More Virus Sneakiness

I received the following email last night:

“Dear user of e-mail server “Yahoogroups.com”,
Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions.
Please, read the attach for further details.
For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is “87240”.
The Management,
The Yahoogroups.com team http://www.yahoogroups.com”

There was a password-protected zip (compressed archived) file attached.

The alarm bells started ringing in my head, even though my virus scanner had passed this attachment as clean. If Yahoo really had something to tell me, why would they put it in a password-protected file? I did NOT open the file, and I warned my fellow moderators of this Yahoo group not to open it. I turned to my group of expert friends for their opinions, and one told me he had recently received this warning from his ISP: “There’s a new virus on the loose that’s able to trick our antivirus program on our email server. It’s in a password protected zip file. Unfortunately, there is no method to scan password protected zip files, so our server sends it through.”

The moral of the story is the same as it’s always been: if you are not expecting a file from somebody, and/or anything seems strange about the situation, do NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. You’ll save yourself and everyone in your address book a world of trouble.

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