Tuesday, November 22, 2005

w32/sober.jen@mm worm


For Immediate Release
November 21 , 2005



Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

FBI ALERTS PUBLIC TO RECENT E-MAIL SCHEME

E-mails purporting to come from FBI are phony

Washington , D.C. – The FBI today warned the public to avoid falling victim to an on-going mass e-mail scheme wherein computer users received unsolicited e-mails purportedly sent by the FBI. These scam e-mails tell the recipients that their Internet use has been monitored by the FBI and that they have accessed illegal web sites. The e-mails then direct recipients to open an attachment and answer questions.

The e-mail appears to be sent from the e-mail addresses of mail@fbi.gov and admin@fbi.gov. There may be other similarly styled addresses. The recipient is enticed to open the zip attachment which contains a w32/sober.jen@mm worm. The attachment does not open and its goal is to utilize the recipient’s computer to garner information. Secondly, the virus allows the e-mail to be forwarded to all those listed in the recipient’s address book.

The text of the email is as follows:

For the full text, click HERE

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well, there's one circulating purporting to be from the CIA, as well.

When you delete the message, make sure it doesn't just go into the trash file. If you have a shredding function (like the Thunderbird program does) use that.

Also, as a security measure, it's a good idea to set preferences on your browser to "clear cache" on closing and shut down your browser from time to time.

Both Opera and Firefox make it possible to edit whose cookies actually get to stay when the browser is closed--a good idea, as well. Some pages will crash if you don't let them set cookies, but that's just too bad.

hannah