The US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) has told computer users to be wary of potential e-mail scams, as well as fake anti-virus and phishing attacks regarding the Japan earthquake and the tsunami disasters.
Tech support personnel might have to go desk to desk to do fixes, or perform maintenance on e-mail servers that have become clogged with virus-generated messages.
By attacking a loophole in Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program it has rewritten laws of virus prevention and punched a big hole in PC users security systems that others can drive through.
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Schrader said the best defense against Trojan Horse e-mail viruses is end-user education -- and, of course, updated virus-scanning software.
Feeding off a mix of millennial angst and residual technophobia, Wobbler is just one of numerous virus hoaxes circulating by e-mail.
The virus was spread by e-mail as an "executable" (.exe) file capable of running on Windows 95 and 98 operating systems.
In a cunning twist by the virus writers, an e-mail in wide circulation that purportedly offers a "fix" for the Sasser worm actually infects the user's computer with a different virulent worm, known as Netsky-AC.
The worm that infected computers at the Marine Corps headquarters at the Pentagon early Friday was ExploreZip, an especially malicious virus that typically travels by e-mail, according to a Marine Corps spokesman.
The Foreign Secretary William Hague revealed in February that computers belonging to the government had been infected with the "Zeus" computer virus, after users opened an e-mail purporting to come from the White House and followed a link.
The calls for coordination became louder after the "I Love You" virus in May affected almost every federal e-mail server and taxed many agencies' resources.
It came two years later, in 1999, when the Melissa virus caused big U.S. corporate e-mail systems to collapse, resulting in billions of dollars of losses.
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Cognos, a software company ravaged by the Melissa virus, configured its mail servers to block incoming e-mail attachments exceeding 25KB.
The Kournikova virus, which only affected those using Microsoft's popular Outlook e-mail program, went on the rampage in February.
When it reaches a new victim, the virus searches for addresses to despatch itself to and also picks a random e-mail address for the 'from' line to cover its tracks.
Virus-monitoring company MessageLabs said it had detected and stopped 155, 528 e-mail viruses by the end of November - a rate of one every three minutes.
When the Anna Kournikova virus was spreading wildly in 2001, it infected millions of computers and clogged e-mail servers by offering a racy picture of the teen tennis star to unsuspecting e-mailers.
While a computer virus requires some sort of human intervention to be launched, such as opening an e-mail, a worm takes off on its own.
"Among the other recipients of spam e-mails generated by the virus are users' mail2blogger accounts, which allow them to update their blogs via e-mail, " said the spokesperson.
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