Okay, so technically, "virii" may not be the actual plural of virus, but I think it should be because it's cool.

The only email program I use is the one for my work address, and I rarely get more than a couple of messages a day there. Other than that, all of my other multitude of email addresses are web-based, thus helping me avoid passing on most of the viruses propagated via, say, Outlook.

Another technique I use to protect my accounts is to rarely post an actual email address online. Rather, when I'm posting comments, etc, I use a catch-all alias which is re-routed to a different email domain entirely.

Here's the interesting part:

I got a 102k message in one of my mailboxes that was "returned undeliverable." The header says that the original message was from my catch-all alias (which doesn't even exist as an actual email account) and the "message" consisted of a bunch of alphabet soup that appears to be some sort of permutation of the code for Sobig (at least, the "attachment" is named "thank_you.pif.")

Kind of reminds me of when the I Love You virus was going around and one of Unilab's attorneys was hit by it. He had our fax number in his Outlook address book, so suddenly we were sent several pages of the raw I Love You code. (I gave it to our IT department who got a kick out of it.)

Anyway, I find this sort of thing fascinating. You can now go on with your normal lives (in Jon's case, trying to clean a gazillion machines of Sobig.)

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QotD

There are only two enterprises that refer to their customers as users, and one is illegal.
— Michael Hammer