Mail Virus

Viruses and worms
1

I seem to have a virus that sends out massive amounts of e-mails to random accounts . I have ran Avast to see if it would catch it and it detected nothing. I ran it again in safe mode and recieved the same result. I tried using some other online scanning devices to no avial. Any idea on how I get rid of this thing? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Much thanks. ???

2

You may have an undetected new worm / spambot. Make sure you have avast! up-to-date and try again. If you can find the email / file that infected you, can you email it to virus [at] avast.com in a password protected ZIP file. Please include the password in the email. “virus” will do.

3

So your allowing the sending out possibly infected emails to random email addresses as a test to see if avast can catch them ???

  • What OS are you using? is it up to date?
  • What avast! version and VPS file (virus database) number, e.g. 0436-4 (see about avast!)
  • What was the virus name, what was the filename, where was it found
    example (C:\windows\system32\infected-filename.xxx)?
  • What actions have you taken to try and resolve the problem?
  • What is your email program? (if applicable)
  1. avast! and the email program have to be set-up to be able to scan outgoing email. This only works with those viruses that use your email program to send out the emails, there are some that come with their own email script and don’t use your email program. So they could get past outbound scan.

However, your firewall should detect a new program connecting to the internet and ask permission, did it?

  1. I assume that you have run a full thorough (include archives) avast scan and it found nothing? if not do so. If you have XP schedule a boot-time scan from within avast.

If you haven’t already got this software, download, install, update and run it.

  1. Ad-Aware
  2. Spybot Search and Destroy
  3. Spywareblaster
  4. Download HijackThis.zip

For an on-line scan of your Hijackthis log file try here http://hijackthis.de/index.php
Ignore any 023 reference to avast processes, this is a hiccup in the HJT 1.99.1 (especially missing file entry for avast), if you need any help with any of the analysis let us know.