You probably had what was known in the press as the "Anna Kournikova"
virus, which sends itself silently to everyone you e-mail. If you send
me mail I can tell you if that is so. The virus sends a message that
contains only an attachment, with one of about 20 different enticing
names. You got it by opening one of those attachments sent to you. It's
been swirling around since January, aided by the stupidity of the
Windows interface. The attachment is named something.avi.pif (like
Me_Naked.avi.pif) or something.jpg.pif, and Windows being its idiot
self, presents this to you as something.jpg on your desktop. But, the
file is actually a PIF file, which can execute, and in doing so installs
itself into your machine and, in some versions, deletes all the
multimedia (gif, jpg, avi, wav) files on your drive. Through another bit
of Microsoft incompetence it catches all your outbound mail and sends
a copy of itself as another message to everyone you mail. Cool, eh?
All the current antivirus utilities can clean it up, though none can put
back your deleted multimedia files. Fortunately this List doesn't allow
attachments, so you didn't get infected from here.
If you machine is within a couple years old, you could probably use the
BIOS password.
In article <00ab01c0ccf3$d5f50de0$0abb0041@reno1.nv.home.com>, you wrote:
> I received an email, according to the source, from myself and addressed to
> 'undisclosed recipient'. The body of the email was what appeared to me some
> type of HTML coding, but was complete jibberish.
>
> Some of you wrote back, asking what it was. I don't have a clue!
>
> A further interesting thing is that I save all SENT MAIL. This email was not
> in the 'sent mail' file.
>
> THUS, I'm suspecting some type of virus got into my system and sent itself
> under 'undisclosed recipient' to everyone in my address book.
>
> I've noted that every time the wife and I go away for a race weekend and my
> stepson stays at the house to watch the animals (BUT DOESN'T TOUCH MY
> COMPUTER), something weird with my computer happens. Anybody out there know of
> an "unbreakable" password system I can put on this thing to prevent my "spirit
> guide" from using this thing, since my stepson isn't touching it!?
>
> Thanks, and here's hoping it was a 'microsoft fluke', and not a serious
> virus!!
> Carl
--
= J e r o m e Y u z y k | jerome@supernet.ab.ca
= BRIDGE Scientific Services | www.bss.ab.ca
= Sunbeam Alpine Series II #9118636 | www.bss.ab.ca/sunbeam
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