Computer Virus at Work

[Clark Addison]

I work for one of the largest companies in the world. I am not an expert, but as far as I can tell, we have pretty thorough information security practices. But today, there are thousands, maybe even millions of e-mails going around our company saying:

Hello:

This is The Document I told you about,you can find it Here. http: //www.sharedocuments.com/library/PDF_Document21.025542010.pdf

Please check it and reply as soon as possible.


Cheers,

Enough clueless people have clicked on the link for it to propogate. I've gotten about a dozen copies of it myself, and I know some people who have received several dozen. It's also slowing down our entire e-mail system. Some e-mails are taking close to an hour to get to me.

Is this happening other places, or just here?

EDIT: And like an idiot, I left the link active when I put it in in here at first.

[Moliere]

I work for one of the largest companies in the world. I am not an expert, but as far as I can tell, we have pretty thorough information security practices. But today, there are thousands, maybe even millions of e-mails going around our company saying:



Enough clueless people have clicked on the link for it to propogate. I've gotten about a dozen copies of it myself, and I know some people who have received several dozen. It's also slowing down our entire e-mail system. Some e-mails are taking close to an hour to get to me.

Is this happening other places, or just here?

EDIT: And like an idiot, I left the link active when I put it in in here at first.

It's at my company as well. I received about 40 of these before our IT department shut down our email. When the first one came it I almost responded back saying I wasn't the intended recipient, then my keen senses took over and realized what it was. Not having email all afternoon has been somewhat nice though

[chrisrenrut]

My company had it too. I did reply to the first one, because I am constantly getting emails for other employees with my same first and last name. When the second one came through from a different address, I did a face-palm.

[Scott R Nelson]

When I worked for larger computer companies, we would occasionally see stuff like that when a few dozen clueless people obviously fell for the scam.

I'm at a small enough company now where we don't generally see that from people inside the company. Our IT guys are always fighting the spammers, though. But the mail filters aren't always able to keep ahead of them, so every once in a while I'll see a few messages get through. It annoys me that I would get ANY e-mail messages that don't show me on the To: line, but apparently there are ways to get through. I also find it pretty annoying when a message comes in with a note that the attachment contained a virus or something. I don't know why the the software that found that would send anything like that on to the intended recipient.

But since I almost never send e-mail outside of our company from my work account, I'm normally remarkably spam-free. And my gmail account does a wonderful job of making sure I almost never see any spam as well. Way better than hotmail used to be.

If someone were to put together an assassin team to track down the spammers and stop them permanently, I would be very tempted to contribute to the cause. :rant:

[RobinFinderson]

If someone were to put together an assassin team to track down the spammers and stop them permanently, I would be very tempted to contribute to the cause. :rant:

That actually sounds like an interesting premise for a movie.

[Scott R Nelson]

That actually sounds like an interesting premise for a movie.

That's going to be the plot for the next James Bond movie.

[Uncle Ted]

"Behold! the blessed Data Backup USB Guardian Amulet is born!"

[YOUTUBE]o-Uv5ZNk0RE[/YOUTUBE]

Bonus points will be given to folks that suggest this, in a serious manner, to their company's IT departments and return and report.