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Klez, The Virus that Keeps on Giving

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the isnt-that-special dept.

kylus writes "Wired is running a story about the continued escapades of the Klez virus, and the damage--both to finances and reputations--that it is leaving behind. Between emails from a dead friend and porno spam appearing to be sent from a priest, I think "Don't Believe the 'From' Line" is the correct lesson." God bless microsoft email viruses. I'm on a modem for a few weeks and downloading countless megs of mail viruses is extremely frusterating. Course I'm still getting sircams.

5 of 683 comments (clear)

  1. f-prot and perl solved my problems by Nos. · · Score: 5, Interesting

    After getting infected with sircam (My mcafee wasn't updating or scanning properly for some reason) I decided to say screw it, and start scanning email on my server. Now, anything that comes in, gets scanned firts. If f-prot can't find anything, then it gets delivered, otherwise it never show up in my inbox. If you want a look at what I did, check out my scanner.

  2. Really, how common are these things? by Malc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "Course I'm still getting sircams"

    I've been working for 2.5 years for a company that uses Exchange and Outlook. Most of my friends and colleagues use Outlook or Outlook Express at work and home, although I still use Netscape for personal stuff. I've received 2 email viri ever, and neither of them were the "common" ones like Melissa or SirCam. It leaves me wondering if people are making a big fuss out of nothing, and being a bit sensationalist or simply an anti-Microsoft bigot.

  3. Typical. by scrytch · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The patch that prevents this has been out for over a year now. It's downloadable here. Microsoft included the patch with IE6 and IE5 SP2, so if you have either, you don't need it.

    Good dose of blame goes all around here.

    --
    I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
  4. it's a boon for email farmers by mo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Klez passed through my work a ways back and ever since then we've all been getting all kinds of spam. From what we can figure, the virus replied to all kinds of spam with the From line set to everybody's email address, including mine. So even though I hardly ever give my email away except for work issues, i'm now inundated with spam. Makes me think that someday some spammer out there will write a virus solely to collect email addresses.

  5. Re:that is what by MisterBlister · · Score: 5, Interesting
    You don't need to be infected by Klez to be spoofed. If you're simply in the contact lists of anyone who gets infected, people might get some odd spam that's 'from you'. So not only can you not run outlook but you have to make sure nobody that emails you or might add you to their email contact lists runs outlook...Good luck.

    Unfortunately Microsoft can't take ALL the blame for the problems of Klez... The SMTP itself is inherently insecure to begin with and anyone can send mail that looks like it is from anyone else. Of course you can deduce that the mail is probably not from the source it says it is by tracing the SMTP headers back, but that's esoteric geek knowledge that not many people have relative to the total number of people who use email.