It was only this morning when I received a strange looking email. It had an attachment and looked everything like a virus. My immediate reaction to something like this is to simply delete it as I don't consider messing with viruses a very wise thing to do... This time was a little different however, and I stopped, my finger poised above the delete key. There was something about this email that made me mad. It said that it was not only TO me, but also FROM me. I started to investigate a little more, and sure enough it appeared as though it was coming from me. Now that was bad. Not only that, but they had misspelled my email address. Although it was sent to me at groovyguppy.com somehow they had mashed the from address to make it groovyboovy.com - I don't like viruses, but I hate impersonation. And this was not only impersonation, but bad impersonation at that. So now I was angry and started looking at any possible way to track down this offending sender. With a little basic research it became obvious that the email originated from an ISP in Brisbane, Australia. I have a lot of friends there, so it was likely that one of them was infected. But when I checked out what I thought was a misspelt domain name, I discovered to my surprise that the address really exists. And ironically we are both Robs. What are the chances of that? Probably a lot I guess, with so many domain names and people in this world. But it caught my attention. So the end result was, after finding out that it could be genuine, I checked out the attachment. Sure enough, it was a virus. The Bagel Virus. The BBC News mentions how getting it from Australia is not too uncommon:
Many people in Australia look like they have been caught out by the virus as many of the copies of Bagle caught by MessageLabs have originated there.
The worst part of it all is that the virus makes your PC remote controlable:
As well stealing e-mail addresses Bagle also attempts to let its creator know when it has managed to infect a new victim. It also opens up a backdoor on infected machines that hands over control of that machine to the virus' creator.
That was all news back in 2004. Once again however, in June this year it took to the headlines again. Not much has been heard about it since then, but obviously it is still circulating. So make sure that your antivirus software is up to date and functioning. And finally, in the famous words of Roy Johnson, "If you receive something that says 'Send this to everyone you know,' pretend you don't know me."