wdwguide
Ex Guide Book Author
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2001
- Messages
- 1,441
Some nasty individual appears to have harvested e-mail addresses of contributors to a Disney-related newsgroup or discussion forum in order to distribute a virus or trojan. I myself received more than a dozen of these e-mails, each about 100-110K in size with an attachment, which were spoofed to appear to have been sent from people like Brian Bennet of Mouseplanet, among others. I also know that my e-mail address has been spoofed!
So please, if you receive e-mails from a source you think you know or you trust, but that contain a weird attachment or title, and all of which are approximately the same size, please be sure not to open the attachment and scan your computer for viruses. (in fact, you should always scan attachments for viruses no matter the source). It should be noted that the people that the e-mail appears to originate from are not at fault - we didn't actually send that email, nor did we necessarily open the attachment to execute the code (I certainly did not) - our e-mail addresses were spoofed by an unknown third party to trick you into opening these messages.
The computers that I use for anything Disney-related always run two firewalls and virus scanners at the same time, and the data (name and e-mail address) of those who have submitted information to my web site or purchased my guidebook is stored on a separate, password-protected computer that does not have access to the internet at all. I also do not use an e-mail address book, a feature often exploited by virus and trojan authors to distribute their malicious code. Thus there is no possible way that a hacker could have gotten anybody's information off my systems. I am sure sites like Mouseplanet and others who may have been spoofed in this manner use similar precautions.
It's sad that someone would abuse a whole community in this manner - hopefully this warning will help to prevent this problem from spreading or harming anybody's computers in the process.
So please, if you receive e-mails from a source you think you know or you trust, but that contain a weird attachment or title, and all of which are approximately the same size, please be sure not to open the attachment and scan your computer for viruses. (in fact, you should always scan attachments for viruses no matter the source). It should be noted that the people that the e-mail appears to originate from are not at fault - we didn't actually send that email, nor did we necessarily open the attachment to execute the code (I certainly did not) - our e-mail addresses were spoofed by an unknown third party to trick you into opening these messages.
The computers that I use for anything Disney-related always run two firewalls and virus scanners at the same time, and the data (name and e-mail address) of those who have submitted information to my web site or purchased my guidebook is stored on a separate, password-protected computer that does not have access to the internet at all. I also do not use an e-mail address book, a feature often exploited by virus and trojan authors to distribute their malicious code. Thus there is no possible way that a hacker could have gotten anybody's information off my systems. I am sure sites like Mouseplanet and others who may have been spoofed in this manner use similar precautions.
It's sad that someone would abuse a whole community in this manner - hopefully this warning will help to prevent this problem from spreading or harming anybody's computers in the process.
