VIRUS ALERT--Please Read

[RamVA]

Dear Friends,

Last night I received a forward in my e-mail from a pin trading connection. Normally, I only open forwards from my known friends, and usually automatically delete mail from any address that does not look familiar. For some reason, I decided to open this one, since it was an address I recognized from a recent trade, (even though this person and I did not really have any conversation other than what was needed for the trade) and as the attachment was down-loading, the anti-virus program picked up a virus, and interrupted the down-load, and I deleted the mail. I then got a couple of more after that. Today, I have been inundated with them--at least 2 dozen, all with some kind of notice about friendship, or "friendly screen-saver", and a few other odd notes in the "subject" area. I realized today, that I don't think the forward is actually coming from this trader (which is why I haven't mentioned the trader's name), but someone who has created an email account using this person's name. I'm not too computer savvy (as some of you know) but I assume this is easy to do. The reason I don't think it's from this person is that the "address part"--the @ part--is missing, indicating an AOL account user, since we have AOL, and the trading connection had a different server than AOL.

So, I don't know if someone has targeted me specifically, or if it's pin traders, or disney-site people, or what, but want everyone to be on alert if they receive mail from a previous trading connection that is not trade related, that you don't really know, and strikes you as a little odd.

Also, if anyone else has had something like this happen, please let me know, either in this post, or a PM.

[LynniethePooh]

I, too, received something similar yesterday. In fact, I received several.

One had PART of the an email I recognized as a fellow trader. have not emailed with her in a long time, but I believe she is not on AOL, but this came through as an AOL email. Another was from a 'comcast.net' mailing address. My program is set up not to download files automatically unless I click a tab in my mail. I did not DL these files. For your info, the various subject lines were:

Fw:Joke Love to watch!
Fw:Free Screensaver!!
Fw:Interesting love to watch!!
Fw: Dear Santa

the body of these emails all talked about free screensavers. It was made to appear like a 'friend' has just forwarded me something.

[Dom13]

Pin Pics got a ton of these also. Be VERY careful of attachments. If you have any doubt contact the person it is coming from and ask if they sent you something and what it is.

[mousefan]

I too have been getting quite a few of these strange emails....and luckily haven't been opening them or downloading anything , and again it seems to have started from a person I traded with via pinpics...so I went into pinpics today and opted not to use the trade asst. for a while to see if that makes a difference.

update; Yes mine were from France also.....getting them every hour or so ( multiples) ,and only on my email that I use for pinpics none of my other emails have gotten any but since I posted here earlier that I disabled trade asst. have not gotten one...( had four this am between 9am-10am) keeping fingers crossed..

[Luv2Roam]

We had LOTs of them too yesterday. Luckily Norton was stopping them. Many came from France.

[Chip and Dale]

We had a lot of the strange e-mails containing the virus and they, too, seemed to originate from France. (Not that we recognized the e-mail address of anyone in France, but there they were!) Nasty little thing--thank goodness for Norton.

[cathy1140]

I also got the e-mail from a name that I reconized.. but didn't open the attachment Norton detected something.. I quickly deleted them.. this happen to us last year and the computer went down.. by the virus it took my DH 4 days to get the computer going again... and the computer hasn't been the same..

so be very careful... don't open


Cathy

[RamVA]

Appreciate the replies everyone. Only had a few more come in yesterday. And, computer seems to be ok, so I guess Norton did it's job--whew! Be lost without my computer fix at night!

Still don't quite understand how do "they" get the address of someone you recognize????

[Dom13]

Ruthie this is what is called a worm virus. It infects a computer and sends out a copy of itself to every address in a person's address book and tris to infect each of those computers. It then starts the process all over again. Some of the nastier ones even pull addresses from your in box. It can spread very rapidly as it goes from computer to computer to computer...

Other than tying up bandwith and slowing things to a crawl this type of virus does not usually cause any other damage to an average users computer.

The best defense is to have virus protection and make sure it is up to date. To save all the time (days) necessary to straighten things out it is a small price to pay.

[RamVA]

Thank you Dom, I think I understand now!