Nirenjan’s Space

By now, you are probably aware that a virus has struck the Yahoo! Groups. This virus is fairly intelligent because of two reasons.

1. It searches the address book and the inbox for the word “group” and sends fake mails to that group.
2. The fake mails have a subject which is very similiar to a previous thread in the group

This particular virus has one distinguishing feature. All the virus generated mails have a mail size of around 180K to 190K. Secondly, any virus generated mail, not just this virus, has a major distinguishing feature. The From column in Yahoo will display the mail ID, not the actual name of the person which is configured.

I received some suggestions in the mail as to how to combat the spread of this virus (or for that matter, any generic virus).

1. Create an address entry with the name “!0000″ with no e-mail address
2. Create an address entry with just the e-mail address “aaa@aaa.com”
3. Create an address entry with just the e-mail address “aaabbbcccdddnothing@yahoogroups.com”

Hopefully, with the above addresses in place (they should be the first 3 entries in the address book), the spread of the virus can be stopped.

You can also prevent getting infected by a virus. Avoid opening any attachment if you don’t know the sender or you are not expecting it. Just by looking at the From field is usually sufficient - if you don’t see the name of the sender but just their ID - Select, Delete.

Good luck!

Update: If you have admin access to your group, you can also disable attachements from being sent to group members, thus avoiding the spread of the virus. You can even go the additional step and block all messages totally, without deleting the group altogether.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 30th, 2006 at 7:46 am and is filed under Web/Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.