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Need A "Worm" Killer?
- by Jim Edwards
(c) Jim Edwards - All Rights reserved
http://www.thenetreporter.com
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The horror started last Thursday.
In the space of 2 minutes I received over 300 email
messages, each carrying an attachment of about 100
kilobytes.
In less than 30 minutes my email server started to jam
under the weight of thousands of the messages.
As fast as I could hit the "delete" button it seemed twice
as many viruses hit my in-box. It felt like trying to bail water from the Titanic with a tiny shot glass!
I had just come face to face with the email worm known as "SoBig."
For several reasons this worm hit the web harder than
almost any similar virus before it.
SoBig spreads itself by infecting a computer through an
email attachment, hijacking the newly infected computer's address book, and then emailing itself to those addresses to continue the cycle. That's a pretty typical virus scenario.
But a few things made this worm a lot worse than others,
not the least of which was "email spoofing."
"Email spoofing" entails a technique by which the worm
randomly selects an email address and then (falsely) makes
it look like the newly infected email messages originated
from that address.
This causes major havoc when people start playing the blame game of "you sent me a virus" and try to have innocent people's Internet connections shut down (while the infected computers just keep on mailing).
Also, the worm uses its own smtp server to send mail from infected machines, which makes it even harder to stop.
The result of all this madness?
Web servers slowed to a crawl; email in-boxes clogged with thousands of attachments; email servers strained to the breaking point; people like me sweating bullets!
So what can you, as an Internet user, do to protect
yourself against viruses in general, but also against this
worm in particular?
First, update your anti-virus software to include the
latest virus protection. (Don't get me started on people
who operate a computer without up-to-date virus
protection.) Run a complete scan of your system.
Next, consider using a program that allows you to check
your email *before* it gets downloaded to your computer.
I personally use "Mail Washer" (www.mailwasher.net), a PC program that allows you to see your email, filter it, and delete it without downloading it to your computer.
Get yourself a "Worm Killer!"
Even with the Mail Washer program, I found myself swamped
with messages containing the SoBig worm that I still needed
to delete. I needed something to "kill the worm"
automatically before I ever saw the infected messages in
Mail Washer.
I found a simple, easy-to-use PC program called
"A+ Email Spam Filter" from http://www.cmbsoftware.com
For $19 it will filter your mail before you even download
it to your computer.
All you do is just load in the subject lines for messages
you know carry a virus (such as "Re: Wicked Screensaver" or
"Re: That Movie") and the program automatically deletes the email message from the server before you ever see them.
You can then start watching the email you get and looking
at subject lines with obvious spam words for various types
of medicine, interesting pictures, etc. You then add those words to your A+ filter and you'll never receive or even look at emails containing those words in the subject line.
Though you can do something similar with the filters in
your regular email program, using a combination of
MailWasher and A+ Email Sp^am Filter (or similar programs) allows you to do it all much more automatically and without downloading any of the offending messages or viruses to your computer.
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Jim Edwards is a syndicated newspaper columnist (http://www.TheNetReporter.com) and the co-author
of an amazing new ebook that will teach you how to use fr-e
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