I woke up this morning to find three new email messages in my inbox. Two were viruses sent to me by Jan and one was a personal email from my friend Sophie asking if the email she had received from me this morning was a virus or not (it was!). Needless to say, I was not happy. So into research mode I went…

First, I wanted to know if my computer was infected with a virus. I have been very happy with AntiVir lately so I didn’t want to believe that it had let me down. After a full scan, I was told that my computer was clean. Hmmm. Step two: Yahoo won’t let you download an infected email, but they will identify the virus. They told me that the emails from Jan were infected with two different variants of the W32.Beagle@mm virus. A quick Google search confirmed that this virus propagates itself by aggregating email addresses from a local address book and sending itself to the members of the list. It also creates random “about” messages, attachment names, and “from” addresses. So did Jan really send me that email or was it from someone else who happened to have Jan in their address book? Damn them.

I found and ran a Symantec removal tool to clean infections for variants of the Beagle family. The search came up empty. Apparently, the email was being spread all around but was unable to infect my computer. I hope everyone else is as fortunate.

I logged on to Jan’s email account and found two similar emails from her friend Garry. Then I logged onto another one of my email accounts and found two similar emails from my friend Amber. This was really getting around.

The part that really bothers me is the fact that people are receiving infected emails “from me”. Most people think that I actually know what I’m doing with computers and may trust an email from me over random emails from others. I hope this doesn’t come back to bite them in the ass.

I’m fairly convinced that my computer is (and has been) virus-free. Hopefully everyone else will be smart enough to not open any dodgy-looking email attachments no matter who they’re from. This just goes to show you that the best virus detector isn’t AntiVir, Norton, McAfee, or Panda – it’s common sense.