Experts: Mydoom worm spreading faster than last year's Sobig-F [email servers being clogged]

Why is a ".pif" file bad?

No, a pif file is just a pif file. This virus puts down files with various names and uses .pif suffixes, .zip or others.

The virus software will pick it up if it is actually a virus file. That was my point in context of the earlier post.

I'm getting about 14 of these worm letters an hour; more around the start of each hour as people around the world get to work. It gets heavier when 'office hours' start in Japan, England, New York and Los Angeles as people check their mail and it sends out another flood.

What fascinates me about this one is that the variations are increasing; someone is modifying the carrier programs on the fly. I've got nine signatures that I'm scanning for now in the attachments and am adding one every few hours.

I believe someone out there is modifying this on the fly and adding on variations to it to stay ahead of the virus checkers and spam control programs.

Really quite amazing that someone is going through this much effort and it is really getting annoying in the amount of time that I'm wasting deleting/identifying to be deleted.

I really, though, feel sorry for anyone who has the 'premium' email addresses on servers, such as just a common name (IE: john@whereever.com, anne@whereever.edu) - they're getting slammed hard.

Thank you very much. Isn't it possible for someone to create a computer system that is immune to a virus or a worm?

You are welcome. As for your question, the answer is probably no, unless you want a system that is too complex for the average person to use efficiently.

But I'm sure you will find a lot of Mac and Linux users who will claim that they have never ever had a virus, and they're probably right.

The last Mac virus I personally experienced was many years ago.

The reason for this? Who is going to waste time writing viruses for operation systems that have such a small overall user base (in comparison to the Microsoft Empire, that is).

To somewhat answer another question of yours, I use Norton AntiVirus (Symantec AV, now) on my corporate network and it has worked extremely well. It stopped all of the lastest virii dead in their tracks, before they ever reached the user's Inboxes.

Norton 2004 works well for home PCs, but you have to pay a fee for the Live Update service which updates your virus definitions. Without that, you AV software is pretty much useless, at least for new virii that come out.

There's free AV software and on-line scan sites as well, but I can't really answer to those.

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