Where do all the viruses come from?

Ba_barbaraAnne

Can anyone tell me why there are so many viruses trying to infect my pc lately? AVG catches them all, but I still have 2 or 3 emails a day sent by an endless stream of senders. As fast as I block one, another email arrives from a similar address.

The worst thing is that the latest batch all purport to come from Eircom customer support - anyone who hasn't got a good virus scan would automatically open them.

I've passed the info onto eircom, but naturally they haven't bothered to reply.

Is there anything that can be done to stop this?

lomb

Ba_barbaraAnne wrote:

Is there anything that can be done to stop this?

apart from antivirus and patching the OS no, nothing can be done, there is nothing to worry about anyway, stop opening any emails with any attachments.

or switch to web mail like yahoo that does an av scan on them for u.

mneylon

Ba_barbaraAnne wrote:

The worst thing is that the latest batch all purport to come from Eircom customer support - anyone who hasn't got a good virus scan would automatically open them.

Quite a common ploy these days is to make the virus look like it came from a "trusted" source

Ba_barbaraAnne wrote:

I've passed the info onto eircom, but naturally they haven't bothered to reply.

That doesn't mean that they aren't aware of it

Peeps1977

which is better people avg or norton?

mucho thanx!

Ruu_Old

avg is better and free.

Ba_barbaraAnne

Ruu wrote:

avg is better and free.

Definitely! i've haven't been infected since i got AVG

RicardoSmith

Peeps1977 wrote:

which is better people avg or norton?

mucho thanx!

AVG

norbert64

Have Norton myself, but sadly I have to conceed that AVG is indeed better.

ZENER

I prefer Norton to be honest, I'm always suspicious about trusting free anti-virus software, how do they make their money ??

As for the emails from eircom, have a look at the full header for the true originator of the mail. It could even be your own machine sending them, as a test check if you have eircoms email address in your address book then remove it and see if the mails arrive as quick as before.

The from field is very easy to forge and most viruses will place an address from your mail address book in that field to confuse recipients.

I regularly get spam emails from MYSELF !!! Someone I know has my address in their system and also has/had a virus at some stage so my address has now become public knowledge to all the spammers.

ZEN

kaimera

ah the joys.
no email spam in months :: no viri either.

wonder what it would be like with bb tho... :-|

Zascar

I've been on a few compters lately where Norton has been on there and a scan says its clean but when I put on AVG free it finds a virus or 2... I used to swear by Norton, now I only recommend AVG.

ZENER

I've managed that state of euphoria too !!! I switched off my wintel machine and turned it into a LINtel box . . oh and I bought a Mac

ZEN

mukki

back on topic..
any one pc literate can easily send an email and make it look like "insert email address here" sent it

its very easy for virii to send emails from "forged" address to address harvested from the net, type you email address into google and google groups, if you get even 1 result then you have to get a new email account and tell everyone on your address book + ebay, paypal ect the new address

Ruu_Old

some people buy the avg pro edition i guess also.

Chalk

i dont get spam
had the same email addresses for years.

if it looks like its from eircom and your with eircom your pc is probably wide open
im sure that the zombies out there are scanning for ips, when they get an open one they match it to the isp db they have and send some spam,

either that or its a virus on your pc trying to cause more damage but thats not something ive heard of, still safe to assume your not fully protected.

get a firewall , recommend agnitum, and an av, recommned avk if you paying , avg if your not

Fionn

I've used both Norton and AVG
AVG is certainly better imo
having said that i was cleaning up a computer recently for a person who had not updated their computer either anti virus nor win updates, there were maybe 6/7 viruses on it. The anti virus prog was AVG, but version 6, I updated it to the current version 7 and scanned the system. I then ran McAfee's stinger prog (free download) and this found two worm types that AVG missed. So i suppose it's not totally effective, but i can remember in the past Norton missing lots more than AVG

two other handy resources that i use from time to time are;
Trend Micro Housecall online scan http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ http://www.hackercheck.com/
Norton online virus and security check (Symantec Security Check) http://www.symantec.com/product/index_homecomp.html

AVG is for single non-commercial users only, companies or groups are supposed to buy multiple licenses, thats how they make their money from the corporate business.
it's also got a linux version

Capt'n Midnight

Ba_barbaraAnne wrote:

Where do all the viruses come from?

Sources of viruses, script kiddies on ego trips, military tests (cyberwarefare etc.) , accidentally released proof of concepts,

and the worst - those who try to make money.
spammers - if the make one sale per million emails they break even
blackmailers - if you don't pay us X we will tell 100,000 virus infected zombie PC's to jam your website
phishers - if we pretend to be someone else , will you give us lots of money

etc.

As for stopping this - plenty of stickies and threads about it in this forum and windows, much of it involves having upto date windows patches, and upto date patches for every program you use, and besides the often bypassed antivirus products you need other spyware/malware/script blockers and A firewall and if it's email you are worried about Spambayes is great since it learns what sort of mail you like / dislike and filters it accordingly

Hotblack Desiato

Chalk wrote:

if it looks like its from eircom and your with eircom your pc is probably wide open
im sure that the zombies out there are scanning for ips, when they get an open one they match it to the isp db they have and send some spam

Eh, no.

I use an eircom email address and occasionally get "From the eircom team" virus emails, and I'm on a linux box

The virus is one of the common ones (can't remember the name) and it does the usual stuff of trawling the infected machine for email addresses and spreading itself

The twist is that it takes the domain name of the recipient and inserts that into the mail - a social engineering attack to fool people into opening it.

As with any other dodgy email just delete it and take the usual windoze precautions. I only boot into windows once every few weeks but the first thing I do is windowsupdate, AV update, Spybot update, and ZoneAlarm update. Pain in the butt but it has to be done.

eircom will almost certainly not respond to complaints about this email because it's nothing to do with them and they are powerless to prevent it.

The_B_Man

Ba_barbaraAnne wrote:

Where do all the viruses come from?

McAfee and Norton make them!

Ruu_Old

well if there were no viruses, there would be no need for companies like symantec or mcaffee apart from their firewall products

osmethod

To help things a bit for you you could download "Mailwasher" from

http://www.mailwasher.net/download.php.

It is a program that you configure with your email details. It pulls down only the headers from the isp's server so you can view them. Delete what you do not want, consider spam and it deletes them from the isp server.

Then proceed to download with outlook or whatever client you use. You should now only pull down the mails you are happy with from previous viewing

A similar program but a bit more technical is "Spamcomat"

http://www.glocksoft.com/sc/

Alternatively, you could use www.mail2web.com and type in your ffull email address and password. This will also allow you to delete the unwanted mails first before dowloading your mail.

osmethod

condra

Many people will have 2 email addresses. 1 which is like a spare for registering with dumb ass sites etc... Right now I have about 6 email addresses which is far from ideal. My favourite is my online.ie email where I get very little spam. Hotmail is a spam magnet.

RicardoSmith

womoma wrote:

Many people will have 2 email addresses. 1 which is like a spare for registering with dumb ass sites etc... Right now I have about 6 email addresses which is far from ideal. My favourite is my online.ie email where I get very little spam. Hotmail is a spam magnet.

I have a similar setup. Though I find the less you use hotmail the less spam you get. Even the account I use for registering stuff on the web gets little spam since I access it very little.

Blub2k4

You'll find that a lot of what AVG calls viruses are not viruses at all, but spyware.
There is a nasty trend among AV vendors to look like the first to market and show up their competitors that they have started misnaming stuff and detecting it earlier.
From a customer side this is not obvious, from an AV vendors side it is very obvious.