An email worm or virus?

right click delete that email ......run your antivirus and mailware

The so-called "Storm Worm" swept into U.S. email systems on Friday, cutting a wider swath of American email systems than within Europe.

According to Finnish security analyst F-Secure, the "Small.DAM' worm infected 20.3 of the American servers the company tracks, compared to only 15.7 percent of European systems. In both geographies, the firm ranked the worm as a "medium" threat.

Originally propagated on the heels of a killer European storm, the worm has been seen in the wild with the following subject lines: "230 dead as storm batters Europe," "A killer at 11, he's free at 21 and...", "British Muslims Genocide," "Naked teens attack home director," and "U.S. Secretary of State

Condoleezza Rice has kicked German Chancellor Angela Merkel".

When one of four attachments is opened -- Full Clip.exe, Full Story.exe, Read More.exe, or Video.exe -- the worm installs the "wincom32" service, and injects a payload, passing on packets to destinations encoded within the worm itself.

"What makes this exceptional is the timely nature of the attack," Mikko Hypponen, head of research at Finnish data security firm F-Secure, told the Reuters news service. Hypponen said thousands of computers, most in private use, had been affected.

As of Friday morning, the list of antivirus companies that had detected the worm included Authentium, BitDefender, clamAV, eSafe, FProt, Kaspersky, Norman, Sophos and Virusbuster, leaving off top names like Symantec, according to a blog entry posted by Johannes Ulrich, chief technical officer of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center.

According to Symantec, however, the worm was picked up by its heuristic detection methodology. "The attachment is not a video clip, but a trojan horse program, which Symantec heuristic technology already detected as Trojan.Packed.8. Today's LiveUpdate definitions detect it as Trojan.Peacomm. Users of Symantec's Brightmail Anti-Spam are also protected from this spam email," Amado Hidalgo, an employee of Symantec, reported in a Symantec security blog.

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Delete the email, don't open any attachments. These have been showing up a lot in the past few weeks. It just means some spammer happened to pick up you email address and forged emails from you, but the recipient's mailer picked it up and rejected it. They probably weren't really sent by your email program -- run a full virus and spyware scan to make sure, then just delete these messages.

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Computers with viruses copy the address books in the infected computer and send out spoofed headers with the addresses of the people they collect. When another computer kicks it back it will go to your computer even though you didn't send it. Always run the latest virus protection, email protection software and remember to update often.

Norton, AVG, Avast are free antivirus software.

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