Virus alert: Reply: A report on radiation contamination of Australia

The Internet presence of JustLocal means we receive a lot of unwanted emails. That's OK, because it also means I can often see new virus outbreaks and this blog lets my clients know.

I use OzEfilter (and so do my clients) so I can review and delete emails from people I don't know at the mail server, without letting potentially dangerous emails into my computer. I often wonder how people can work in this day and age where they receive tens of potentially dangerous emails each day. Over a year that's thousands of chances they take where they could infect their computer. These viruses are not picked up by the leading anti-virus software packages and once the anti-virus software is updated days later, the virus outbreak will have affected thousands of people, which is confirmed by my site statistics.

The latest virus comes in an email with the subject: "A report on radiation contamination of Australia". I would normally delete at the mail server using OzEfilter, but for the benefit of my clients, I decided to receive and investigate the email.

The body of the email contains the following:

"On Internet forums there appeared messages of a powerful explosion at a Australia nuclear power station located in the suburbs of Sydney.. According to witnesses’ statements the explosion happened at about 3 pm on the 9th of September. ..."

The email contains an attachment victims.zip which contains the file victims.exe. An exe file is an executable file and whilst the zip attachment should be a warning, the exe file should is an obvious danger sign.

The virus infected email was not reported by our computer's anti-virus software and neither was it stopped by the anti-virus software on our mail server provided by the hosting company. The file has been submitted to the online scanning service provided by one of the leading anti-virus companies which service the corporate sector. Details of how to submit a suspicious file is included in MyAnswers solution 1885.

Please practise safe computing.

- Kelvin Eldridge