An Open Message to My Windows-Using Friends

As you may or may not have heard, there are a number of computer viruses running rampant in the e-mail system right now. The most virulent appears to be the Sobig worm, which arrives in your inbox as a file attached to a message, possibly from someone you know, with an innocuous subject line. When it gets on your computer, it sets up its own SMTP (that is, mail-sending) server and searches your computer for any and all e-mail addresses, which it uses to propagate itself and falsify "From:" headers.

For more information on the virus and what it does to your computer, see these pages:

McAfee Security: W32/Sobig.f@MM

Symantec Security Response: W32.Sobig.F@mm

Sophos Virus Analysis: W32/Sobig-F

You may have this virus and not know about it.

Outlook and Outlook Express are especially notorious for opening attachments automatically, but other programs could download it, too, based on your settings. Plus this is a particularly bad situation, as many servers block messages that appear to contain viruses, which bounces them back to the falsified "From:" address rather than the infected computer, which may spread the infection even more.

I have been getting tons of these bounced messages, which means at least one person who has my Northwestern e-mail address stored somewhere on their computer is infected. Please do everyone a favor and download the removal tools from the above web sites and make sure your computer is secure.

If you're using a Mac, you can't get infected yourself, but you might accidentally forward the virus to a Windows user if you don't delete these infected messages.

Never open attachments if you don't know what they are! Who knows what a ".pif" file could contain?