^_^ meay-meay!
6 September 2004, mid-afternoon
I got an email from my GMail account sent to my Funkaoshi account. Now, I didn’t send it. At first glance I thought someone had hacked my GMail account, but had been nice enough to send me the new password, since the message looked like this:
Looking forward for a response :Ppassword: 28382
But when I logged into Gmail, I didn’t see the letter in my sent mail box. Well, also, I didn’t need to use the new password. Damn, a virus I thought. I didn’t notice at first, but the message contained an attachment. You needed to use the enclosed password to open the attachment. Once open, there is a .src file. Now, on a PC, perhaps at this point bad stuff would have started happening. On my Mac, things are less exciting. The .src file opens in GraphicConverter of all programs, and just ends up showing me a lot of hex code.
The question I have for you out there is this: has anyone else seen something like this? Has anyone else got this email from me? The message is called __ meay-meay!_ and has a playful little message inside. It is a little bit creative in that it plays on peoples curiosity.
On a side note, I get all my virus spam email from South Africa.
I wouldn’t worry about someone having access to your account. Your address was probably spoofed, most likely from someone else who knows your Gmail address.
by Robert on September 6 2004, 4:05 pm #
.scr is one of the lesser known executable file-endings (like .pif, and the better known .bat, .exe, .com). To get viruses past virus-scanners, they get put in password-protected zip-files. This actually happens a lot.
As for the sender-adress: As Robert writes it was very likely spoofed. Someone who probably has both of your adresses on his PC got infected, and you happened to get an E-Mail that looked like it was from your other account. (Or maybe both adresses are stored somewhere on a single web-page?)
by Sencer on September 6 2004, 4:25 pm #
Spoofing headers and what have you seems a bit too easy to do. There needs to be better methods on the internet for authenticating emails. This however was a cute coincidence. A refreshing change of pace from the usual virus spam I get.
And interesting to know how creative these virus writers are. I didn’t realize that password protected attachments were commonplace.
by ramanan on September 6 2004, 4:33 pm #
.scr files are, if my windows days come back to me, screensaver executables.
by Kenneth on September 7 2004, 1:56 am #