Windows virus lately?

[Trevor Smith]

Yesterday at school the support people mentioned that a new virus had crashed 
their mail server. Then my employer said she had received numerous virus 
infected emails last night. Last night and today I've been getting bounces, 
some of which said "hey this message YOU sent has a virus in it", and all of 
which had an attachment of some kind (probably the aforementioned virus).

However, I have been using Linux almost exclusively for the past 2 weeks and 
the odd time I have booted to Win2k, I have not sent or received email.

My theory is that I probably did not send anyone any viruses but that the 
virus du jour actually steals addresses from people's address books and sends 
itself using those addresses as its "to" address. This theory is supported by 
the fact that I have received some dubious looking messages from people who 
have some "six degrees" sort of connections to me, but whom I have never 
corresponded with (so they might have been in other people's address 
books...). These messages I've received have had attachments that didn't look 
right so I deleted them as usual.

What do you think? If I have only been doing my emailing with Linux, is it 
possible that I have been sending a Win virus? Just thought you linux people 
might have a better idea.

FWIW, I have a firewall installed on Linux (I believe) and I run tiny personal 
firewall on Win2k at all times too. So sneaky apps that try to send out data 
without permission or those that try to usurp control or overwrite existing 
programs are noticed immediately on Win2k by TPF.

-- 
 Trevor Smith    |    trevor at haligonian.com