Increased Number of Viruses

As some of you may have noticed there are a lot of viruses these days that arrive by e-mail and that slip through the virus filters. The current pattern involves ZIP attachments that contain executable code (EXE) inside it. The mail pretends to come from DHL, UPS, FedEx, or Xerox. We expect other fake senders like airline or hotel reservation systems to follow. We also expect to see infected PDF or MS office attachments.

The current viruses appear long before their signatures make it into the lists of the major anti-virus (AV) software. By the time the signature appears in the official lists the virus wave is usually already over. Be aware that no AV software can protect you reliably form viruses. All the AV software can do is keep the old known viruses at bay.

We are currently working hard to find such viruses and we keep our internal list of unofficial signatures. Once we recognize a new virus we clean them out of the user inboxes and move them to the SpamBox. However, we cannot garantee that we find all viruses.

Please be vigilant and do not trust attachments. ZIP and EXE are almost always bad. PDF are often OK but sometimes bad. Mail senders can be faked so make sure that you really expect an attachment from the sender.