Wirehead Studios

Well for some reason, there's a virus spreading like wildfire. It's fairly similar to all of the other recent email viruses. It pretends like it's an email error message with a binary attachment. The attachment is a ZIP file with the virus in it rather than an EXE, SCR, or PIF attached directly, so virus scanners are having trouble finding it. When you open it, it starts your run of the mill spoof-your-email-and-send-to-everyone-on-your-computer worm. It apparently will try to DDOS attack sco.com on Feb 1 as well.

Anyway, I made this a news item since it seems a stupid number of stupid people are opening these attachments. Don't be stupid.

Thanks to http://www.shacknews.com (http://www.shacknews.com) for the info

The Novarg worm has a few variants now.  Norton's trapped .pif, .scr, .exe and .bat versions of it on the way into my netzero addy.  I've already had 20 attempts from people to email me this thing in one day, so I can only assume a LOT of people are being idiots and not patching.   Spammers have a bad habit of making this problem epedemic as well because you get mass mails with multiple addresses.  Also PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE turn off the "automatically add people to your address book" feature.  If you DO get hit with a virus then people you've spoken to maybe once and never hear from again are in your address book and they get hit with the virus, and it only helps to propagate this crap.

This one is also using the typical "scan the address book and forge the header" routine, so watch your messages carefully.  If you get emails from someone you know and it says "Hi" or "Hello" in the subject line with an attachment, do NOT open it.  It's also unlikely the person the email is supposedly from really has the virus and sent the email.  In those cases the virus snagged their addy from someone else's book whom they contacted in the past whom in turn got infected and the virus forged the header with the address snagged from the book.  You may also get mailer daemon failure notices with attachments on them bounced back from addresses you never sent anything to.  Same deal.

With that being said, be careful.  Just because the email is supposedly from someone you know treat it as an imposter until proven otherwise.  If you're not using email scanning and a good antivirus program with up to date definitions then YOU are also part of the problem.  Patch, scan, and be safe!

According to this article, one in every twelve emails has been infected.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/2...read/index.html (http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/01/27/mydoom.spread/index.html)

To put this into perspective, I get, on average, one email a day.

I've gotten over 25 in the last 12 hours, and not a single one was real. All were virus-laced.