Pesky virus

[M A Young]

On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Michael Sullivan wrote:

> I've got a small problem.  Last week I received in my
> non-espersunited.com email account an email from someone I don't know
> with an .exe file as an attachment.
> ...
>  I wasn't too worried
> about it until this morning, when I received a message from another SMTP
> server saying that my mail was undeliverable to some person's email
> account.

 A lot of the currently common viruses forge the From: addresses, and you
have to check the headers to see where they really came from; and even
then this isn't always useful.
 The only successful linux viruses have been worms (ie. programs that
exploit known security holes) and there hasn't been one of those for a
couple of years or so, and if you keep your system up-to-date you should
be safe. There are programs such as clamav that will scan for (windows)
viruses on unix, though these are typically used for mail scanning etc.

	Michael Young