virus?

red_ice

Alright lads. I just checked my junk mail today and came across this message. Is that a virus? I dont look at porn or download warez, i just use my machine for college and counter-strike. I have norton installed, a software firewall and a hardware firewall too. I did notice that my norton is upto date.. which is odd considering that i havent updated this week (im due) and i manual update every 2 weeks or so and scan on the day of update.

From : Mail Delivery System <Mailer-Daemon@server1.vnpages.net>
Sent : Tuesday, March 30, 2004 10:57 PM
To : skeme69@hotmail.com
Subject : Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender

| | | Junk E-Mail | Inbox


This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

kelli@kellishaver.com
This message has been rejected because it has
a potentially executable attachment "application.pif"
This form of attachment has been used by
recent viruses or other malware.
If you meant to send this file then please
package it up as a zip file and resend it.

---

This is a copy of the message, including all the headers.

---

Return-path: <skeme69@hotmail.com>
Received: from [68.20.22.117] (helo=kellishaver.com)
by server1.vnpages.net with esmtp (Exim 4.24)
id 1B8REM-0001Gc-HM
for kelli@kellishaver.com; Tue, 30 Mar 2004 15:57:10 -0600
From: skeme69@hotmail.com
To: kelli@kellishaver.com
Subject: Hi
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2004 15:57:12 -0600
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0016----=_NextPart_000_0016"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
Message-Id: <E1B8REM-0001Gc-HM@server1.vnpages.net>

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

---

=_NextPart_000_0016----=_NextPart_000_0016
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="Windows-1252"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Try this game ;-)

---

=_NextPart_000_0016----=_NextPart_000_0016
Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
name="application.pif"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
filename="application.pif"

Any ideas what that is?

JohnK

From the looks of it, someone who had your email address on their pc got infected and sent out a virus claiming to be you. When the virus was found by the recipient’s antivirus software, an automated message was sent to the apparent sender informing you of the virus that would appear to be on your pc.

I wouldn’t worry about if I was you. I’ve gotten a few of these myself. Also, Norton usually tries to update itself automatically.

radiospan

I get plenty of those emails too. I wonder what percentage of spam is made up of return to sender emails from Mailer-Daemons?

What really disturbed me a few days ago was that part of an email I had sent to someone had been sent to lots of other Cork-based email addresses a few days later.

I have no idea how this happened, and it wasn't just sent to people in my address book either. I got emails over the next few days from people saying that they "only received half of my message".

Norton doesn't show anything, could it be a virus on the original recipient's machine?

I'm losing faith in email somewhat, well over 90% of emails I receive are spam (over 200 a day).

If ever I can't check email for a week or so, I'll have thousands to download when I come back. I can't completely trust spam filters either, in case it marks some important "ham" by mistake.

rom1

I had the same problem as you...
I was receiving maybe 30 spams a day and didn't want to come back from a week holiday with having to manually go through a few hundred emails to check the genuine ones... Even with a Spam filter you need to go through the messages marked as Spam. At least check the title of those emails.
I decided to go for SpamGourmet and FastMail. It's a perfect match. I use the disposable addresses from SpamGourmet and a few aliases from FastMail. That's the best solution I have found at the moment and I get 0 spam. The only drawback is that there is more maintenance required...