Patch This

My e-mail had actually been relatively spam-free up to this point, but now over the last couple days I’ve been flooded with fake messages in one of two forms:

1) The Microsoft Security Patch

An obvious hoax if you look at the right spots (somehow I don’t think MS’s e-mail address is bqgkxiqisa@support.net), but unfortunately some people will believe it and get suckered into running it and infecting their systems.

2) The undeliverable message notice

These messages try to give you the impression that you sent a piece of e-mail with an attachment to someone and it bounced, hoping you’ll be confused enough that you’ll open it up to remind yourself what it was when, of course, it’s really just a virus in the attachment. The same one as the trojan above, in fact. There’s also a variation on this one where you get a legitimate bounce message from a mailer because it had anti-virus protection, except that you weren’t the person who sent it in the first place because the virus spoofed your address from someone else’s address book, and the anti-virus software has now oh-so-helpfully sent you a copy of the virus as well. :-P

Although they’re easy enough to spot and delete, they’re still getting annoying. I’m receiving about 30-40 a day now and at 110k or more each, they’re wasting a lot of space and risk filling my mailbox and preventing other e-mail from getting through. My private mailbox is fortunately untouched so far, but I do still need to check for the occasional potentially important stuff in the public mailbox, too.

I’m not sure what brought this flood on so suddenly, but now I really need to set up those filters…

(Update: Apparently this is the newly-released W32.Swen.A virus.)