Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Recent Letter to a Friend ...

I looked at the spam emails I've been getting from your yahoo email ... they are redirecting traffic to a waurez site, which is geek jargon for a hacker resource site. The site has the extension "ru.gg." The original source of the email appears to be another yahoo email, but the headers in the email may have all been faked, so there's not necessarily anything to go on.

It may be that they've just farmed your email off the web and are using it to generate spam. However, it may be more hostile. If your computer had spyware or other software installed on it as a result of you going to a link like the one being sent in your emails, your computer may be generating the emails. It's possible that your computer is infected with some sort of spyware, malware or virus. I am afraid to look at the link to see what it does ... because I may not be able to protect myself from it.

I did some searches and there's enough traffic on google that it pops up a shortcut to the "ru.gg virus" so that I am just going to guess that you have a virus.

If you have back ups of your data then -- don't worry about this too much -- but I would spend some time backng up data on your computer to cd's or dvd's Then, I recommend that you update your computer's Operating System (I am just going to guess that it's Vista, based on what I read about this on line). Get all of the recommended security patches -- and then set your computer up to automatic update, especially if you are online all the time. Then, update your McAfee and manually run a scan on your entire computer. They may be using a thing called a browser helper object to reinstall itself when you start your browser ... Let me know if you notice anything unusual about the browser ... like it keeps going to some other page when you set it to go to your normal home page. These are often hard to fix.  If the virus is a worm, it will be equaly hard to fix, and sometimes your applications can be affected too.  You might need help.

You should really "scream" at yahoo, because they should be willing to join the community of people in the world that are trying to prevent and intercede against hacking. Asking you to change your password is not going to prevent this kind of attack from succeeding. They should know that.

If you want me to help you try to fix this -- I can look at it.