Sobig Virus - Pls. Read

[Mark Cahill]

Over the last couple of days, our mailboxes have been flooded with the results of a particularly nasty email worm, W32.Sobig.F@mm.

Essentially, this worm is on a number of your machines, and since our public email addresses are in many of your address books, or are otherwise cached on your machines, we are receiving literally thousands of copies of this worm in our mailboxes every day. This, on top of our already massive normal email loads. Macintosh, Unix and Linux variants are not affected.

So, I'd like to ask that those of you who use the affected operating systems, namely any Windows OS post-3.x, please go to the link listed below, and follow the steps necessary to ensure that this worm is not exploiting your machine to spam everyone you know with copies of itself.

You can run a free virus scan online here...click the "scan here" link. (http://housecall.trendmicro.com/) Personally, I use McAfee which you can buy here
(http://www.mcafee.com)
For more information, you can read this notice from Symantec.

http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.sobig.f@mm.html

We greatly appreciate your help in alleviating this problem.

Mark

[hightechtoo]

Mark,

What I haven't seen, is an easy, safe way to determine if any particular machine is affected.

The fix is a little complicated...but well worth it if you actually have the virus. If you don't have it...why go through all that?

I have checked the registry on my machines and have determined I do NOT have the virus....but I'm not sure I would recommend fiddling with the registry to everyone.
Any easy way to tell if you actually have the virus?

[Mark Cahill]

Everyone should be running an Antivirus program, which is set to autoupdate every couple days, and to run a full virus scan nightly. It's the only way to be sure, and an important part of safe computing.

I just finished deleting over 700 emails I recieved between 7pm last night and 9 am this morning. It's a horrendous pain in the but, even with a fast connection. It made it impossible to read email over my dialup from home.

Your right, registry hacks aren't appropriate for everyone. I am altering the message to ask everyone to run a virus scan with information on how to do it if they have not.

It's probably only a handful of people that have the problem.

Mark

[tmillerzzz]

I fight this stuff all day every day for a living...

On top of keeping your machine updated and having the latest virus protection.

IF YOU GET EMAIL FROM SOMEONE YOU DONT KNOW... DON'T OPEN IT
DONT READ IT
DONT OPEN UNKNOWN ATTACHMENTS
just DELETE IT... PERIOD..

its that simple.

[Mark Cahill]

File attachments are the big problem. Don't open them unless you know who they are from, what they are, and have been scanned...

[hightechtoo]

OK, Never open attachments, I preach that around here....and use Anti Virus Software....

BUT....

How does the home/casual user know if he or she has the virus? They won't use the "fix" program if they don't know they're infected.

Can they check for a specific file in a specific directory?

I think if there were a simple "test" other than the usual antivirus stuff......it would help.