Tax Guru-Ker$tetter Letter
Thursday, July 26, 2001
Staying Ahead of Viruses
This recent SirCam virus has made it very risky to check email. My email program for several years has been Eudora. Unfortunately, it just downloads everything without giving a preview list of what messages are waiting in the in-boxes.
Since I received my first SirCam virus mailing on Monday (7/23/01), I have resorted to pre-screening my email by using the free service at Mail2Web. This gives a listing of the individual mail items awaiting download. The SirCam virus messages are easy to spot. They all have attachments that are larger than 250 kb in size. So far, I have received about 20 such messages. Half have been from clients and the other half are from email adresses that I don't recognize. Using the Mail2Web service, I have just deleted them and then used my normal Eudora to download them into my normal filtering folders.
All of the virus protection services seem to have removal tools. The one I downloaded to check our computers was this from Symantec. So far, none of our computers has been infected; but if we don't continue to pre-screen and delete, it could very well happen.
KMK