Viral Pandemonium

Trojan Horse Disguises Itself as Official Microsoft Email

THIS WARNING PUBLISHED BY SOPHOS - Tue, 1/13/2004: The Dloader-L Trojan horse (also known as Xombe) pretends to be from Microsoft, posing as a critical update for Windows XP. Sophos advises companies on how to protect themselves against this and future email-borne attacks.

Click here for full story from Sophos.

The email servers at EMU continuously scan all messages going through the EMU email servers and will drop any dangerous attachments based on the attachment extension name (click here for a full list of "dropped" attachments). This means that, while using the EMU email system, users should never receive such an attachment.

Microsoft may, at times, issue ALERTS via email but NEVER distributes software or patches using email. You can be certain that any message purporting to be from Microsoft with an attachment that contains software is a dangerous deception.

We are passing this ALERT on to our users so that they are aware of this situation in case they encounter it while using a mail system other the EMU email system (i.e. Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL or your local ISP at home). It is possible that some of these mail systems will also detect and block this Trojan attachment, but this is not a certainty.

Persons who use non-EMU email systems on computers attached to the EMU network need to be diligently aware of the risks posed to themselves and other EMU network users from mail that is possibly infected with viruses introduced from non-EMU email systems.

If you have any questions about this or other viruses and Trojans, please contact the Info Systems Helpdesk (helpdesk@emu.edu, x4357, 540-432-4357). Posted by ruttj at January 13, 2004 03:51 PM