This morning I received an email from secur@iinet.net.au, supposedly from Yahoo Canada Mail. It says “Our firewall determined the e-mails containing worm copies are being sent from your computer” It refers to a virus called a Network Worm. It then asks that I install an update for worm elimination. The update is shown as a file attachment and has the name “Update_KB1093_x86.exe (16k)”.
Assuming this was legitimate, I attempted to download this file. AVAST! 4.7 stopped it because it recognized the file as containing a virus. The details are:
Malware Name: Win32:Wavezov-ASQ[Wrm]
Malware Type: Virus/Worm
Has anyone else encoutered this and if so do you have any details?
This is a common social engineering attempt (that succeeded) to get you to download and install malware, fortunately avast blocked it.
General advice never open attachments or click links in unsolicited emails.
A host firewall wouldn’t have a clue what is on your system, a host anti-virus perhaps, if it scanned your system. But, there is absolutely no why it knows what is on your system, much less your email address to be able to send you a warning.
The idea to try and scare you to death whilst offering the solution to your non-existent problem.
Thanks David. It worked - it did scare me to death! Since I posted my question here, I was able to find out it was a bogus problem. That said, I do appreciate your explanation. I’ll be more careful in the future. I was prepared to notify all contacts in my Address Book first thing this morning but glad I did the research first - saved some embarassment and many annoyed people.
The Internet is certainly a great tool, isn’t it? Too bad there’s so many unscrupulous individuals out there who want to make trouble for people they don’t even know. Where’s the satisfaction in that?
No problem, happy to have helped, welcome to the forums.
The internet is a great tool but like any tool you have to exercise care as it can be used for good or evil.
The satisfaction they get is in being able to control your system, to either download other malware, which could:
be as simple as using your system to send out spam in the hope someone purchases what they are selling and or trying to infect other systems.
they could open a back door into your system to use it to launch attacks on systems (blackmail) to try and bring down commercial sites.
install a keylogger to try and capture user name and passwords and forward them to the originator of the malware.
This is for the most part for financial gain and or organised crime, gone are the days where it was for kudos of having been able to hack a system and take control of it.