RED ALERT! Virus email circulating!!

[Longwell]

I just received an VERY official-looking email from FedEx (supposedly) with an attached "invoice" I was supposed to download.
I contacted FedEx and they say they have been getting numerous reports of this fraudulent email for 3 days now.
DO NOT DOWNLOAD anything if you get a similar email.
Larry

[CORattler]

Thanks for the tip! Go to: http://www.snopes.com/computer/virus/ups.asp for the background on this.

[exav8tr]

Larry, I got one from E-Cards from "A Friend". My Antivirus program said it had a virus that could not be cleaned. I deleted without opening. This was supposedly from Hallmark.

[simonsrf]

Phil,

Unfortunately, there are lots of greeting card viruses out there.

Who are these sick people who create them?

[Trailer Trash 2]

Some people will do anything to make your life miserable, as there must be.

[Pete Hanson]

We had the pleasant (Not) experience of having one of email accounts hijacked on Friday. While traveling to Maine for the weekend I started getting phone calls from friends who were telling me they got a distressing email from me. Evidently the email stated that I was traveling in Wales, got mugged and needed money. Fortunately, my friends are smarter than me and realized that it was a scam. It took me all evening, after setting up Monty, to get it all squared away. Today I am fixing all my passwords to make them more difficult to hack.

[Waynem]

Pete,
They didn't hijack anything. What they did was harvest your email from one of many, many sources. Most likely someone forwarded an email with your email address still attached. I hate it when I get an email that has been forwarded 10 times and each time all the previous recipients email addresses are listed. Some one in the great circle of friends may have been compromised and the email was harvested from their system. Most good anti-virus programs will protect against that type of harvesting, but it doesn't stop there. Google search your name, like "pete hanson email" without the quotes. If you want to pay for it, your email is available.

It's a sucky system to say the least. Once you have sent anything over the ether, or have posted anything that you even think is in a secure location. It is there forever.

By all means, change passwords frequently. That is a good practice.

What you experiences is a "Spoofed" email that utilizes your email name and address that is visible, but the header information will actually reply to the perpetrator of the email. Header is not the To, CC, or BCC, but the information contained inside the email that directs it where to go. Most email programs will allow you to "view header." That is the true header information. It is what is required to be sent back to the "ABUSE@YOUREMAIL dot COM." Example would be abuse@yahoo.com for yahoo accounts. They act pretty darn fast when they recognize a scam. When I reported exactly what you described to my abuse server, they responded immediately and blocked that return address. Unfortunately they just resubscribe with a new account until their entire domain is blocked.

Good luck to all.

[Pete Hanson]

Wayne, I think my problem went further than your thinking. When support finally got me back into my email account the perpetrator had changed the password, and all the other profile information contained in there, including the so-called secret questions used for identity purposes. They also changed the alteranate email address to their own (or a fake) so I would not get notified that the password had been changed. Interestingly, the address they used in their profile was Nigeria. I had also made the mistake of using the same password for Facebook so they got into that account as well and tried to contact some of my "friends". Support told me that hacking email passwords has become an art form and their purpose is to try and solicit money from your contacts. The lesson learned for me was to use more complex passwords and not use the same one on many different accounts. Luckily, the email account they got into was not my primary one. It is the account I use to do all my online shopping so all the advertising goes there instead of my primary email account.