Annoying Spoof Microsoft E-Mails Containing W32.Swen Virus!

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 4:38 am

Am I the only person getting my in tray jammed up with these spoof e-mails purporting to come from Microsoft support with the latest patch update but really contains a Swen virus attachment?

They don't have a recognisable sender address just something like "MS Corporation Customer Support" which of course its not.
Had them coming for 2 weeks now, roughly 4 or 5 a day, bleeding annoying!

My 2003 Norton Anti virus automatically deletes the attachment but the e-mails keep filling my in tray.

I tried returning them but they just bounce back "unable to route to sender"

Complained to Microsoft and Freeserve who don't give a damn.

Hope I'm not alone in receiving these.

Robbie.

MattB · Post by **MattB** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 9:32 am

Nope you're not the only one.. we get them quite often here in the office but our virus/spam system deletes them.

One word of warning though - NEVER EVER EVER return or reply to ANY spam e-mail at all, EVER! If it gets through then the spammers know for 100% that your e-mail address is valid and you WILL get much more Spam. You ahve been warned

Even the ones that have "Click here to remove from list" can often be hoaxes. Best bte is to get some anti-Spam software, and i think there's a fair amount of free plugins for Outlook to do this (look for ones with Bayes filters).

Post by **Lyndon** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 6:51 pm

yeah i get um too

Pauline · Post by **Pauline** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 7:37 pm

Can you create a message rule? Or block the sender? (both available under "messages" menu).

Or don't these work?

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 1:20 am

Can you create a message rule? Or block the sender? (both available under "messages" menu).

Or don't these work?

Thanks guys for the tips, glad its not just me.

Good suggestion Pauline. I'm no geek but I suspect the trouble with blocking with outlook is that it merely re-routes spam to your deleted items instead of your in tray, but won't block these at the server level which would prevent them from arriving in the first place.

I suppose the spoof e-mails will still download and due to their size will keep clogging my incoming mail for several minutes at a time because I haven't got round to changing to broadband.

As a last resort I trawled the web and found a free download "Fire Trust mailwasher pro version 3.3 "program.

It reads e-mails before they arrive in my in box so I can decide which I want to let through and which to bounce back as spam. The idea is so the recipient sender receives a message that my e-mail address no longer exists and hopefully it will eventually drop me from its spam list.

Its so satisfying to bounce back the crap with a clic of the button and for free!

Robbie.

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Thu Nov 20, 2003 1:04 am

Hey! Looks like that freebie anti-spam program really works.

Been 2 days now since using Mailwasher, I bounced that spoof microsoft spam back from whence it came, it hasn't returned, looks like I'm off the list.

Yipee!

Pauline · Post by **Pauline** » Thu Nov 20, 2003 6:50 pm

Hay Robbie, that's fab - where can I get that from?

But I now have a different problem with spam

Someone's used my email address as their fake reply address (hello, it's real, it's mine!!!!) in their spam email so I'm getting loads of "mailmaster/undeliverables". And it's all for extensions (and not hair extensions either

)

AAAAGH!

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Thu Nov 20, 2003 7:46 pm

Sounds nasty Pauline, there seems no end to the mischief these little buggers get up to.

For a safe & free Mailwasher program try :-

http://www.firetrust.com/download/mailw ... 7d3b5f5f41

(you don't have to sign up before downloading)

slimgym · Post by **slimgym** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 1:09 pm

Been 2 days now since using Mailwasher, I bounced that spoof microsoft spam back from whence it came, it hasn't returned, looks like I'm off the list.

I used MW for a couple of years with little impact, if you look at the reply-to addresses that mailwasher uses to bounce stuff, they were either fakes, apparently from myself, or real people who were just on a spam list like me, the bounces were a further waste of email bandwidth.. No spammer is going to give you an email address you can give to another spammer to get your own back!

Worse, they use ASP code on the server to identify you, so using preview or opening an HTML style image will tell them you exist! For them it's just as easy to send to bogus addresses and costs no more to them, why should they bother to take you off the lists anyway?

I used email long before spam was thought of, and my then address was harvested off newsgroups, it's now unusable, gets 100 spams a day. Even solutions like SpamCop do good jobs but you still end up checking through those it's filtered just in case a real message has been detected as spam.

The only solution I found was to buy a whole domain and use rules if spam appears. So when I register on say B&Q's website, I give them the address BQ@domainname, Tesco might be Tesco@domainname, so if spam does appear you know who sold your address, and you can use the ISP's control panel to prevent delivery of it.

Sadly once you're on a spammers list the only real answer is a new email address

Never put it as a link in a web page mailto:, never post to newsgroups using it, and regularly check search engines to see if anyone else has posted it by mistake! I have a domain, knobrot.co.uk, and some joker is using cockrot@knobrot.co.uk whenever a form asks for email, so I get spam to that now

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 10:02 pm

Oops posting mistake (again

)

Robbie · Post by **Robbie** » Sat Nov 22, 2003 10:07 pm

That's interesting.

So far the microsoft spam etc has stopped for whatever reason, but I'll keep an eye out in case I start receiving more rubbish.

I'll keep Mailwasher to prevent larger spam from clogging up my incoming mail (since I'm not yet on broadband).

slimgym · Post by **slimgym** » Sun Nov 23, 2003 1:04 am

I'll keep Mailwasher to prevent larger spam from clogging up my incoming mail (since I'm not yet on broadband).

It's still useful to check mailboxes and delete spam as it's quick and doesn't preview the images so you don't alert them you exist (they use img src= tags within the images to track when you view it). Initially I thought it was a great idea, but in practice the spam never decreased and when I checked further by looking at the mail headers it was clear the claims about reducing spam were a bit dubious. This was after I'd registered and paid for it too

The other thing it does is detects some virusses and allow you to delete anything that looks dodgy when something like outlook will auto-run some attachments and infect you without you needing to physically open the attachment.