Diary of a Wolfeman

The folks over at ITWorld.com write that a Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years not for spamming per se, but rather for identity theft when he spoofed two accounts to send out “more than 800 million spam messages”.

This one brings it home to me today, since I noticed several bounced emails in my inbox from AOL mail servers. According to the messages, I have tried to send email to a few dead AOL accounts, and they are kindly letting me know that those accounts no longer exist.

Which is right neighborly of them, but I haven’t sent anything to an AOL addy in months. Someone is apparently spoofing my comcast email address.

Since there’s been less than a dozen of these bounces, I’m more inclined to believe that this is the work of a virus on somebody’s home computer. It is probably sending an email to every address in that person’s addy book from every address in that book.

So, if anyone out there has received an odd message from me that you weren’t expecting, let me know so we can compare address books and maybe figure out who the poor slob is that got infected.

Now if I can just track down the loser who keeps sending me vitamin ads to my blog email address…

According to Symantec, there has already been a virus (W64.Rugrat.3344) released for the IA64 Windows platform – which hasn’t even seen wide release yet.

The virus is just a proof-of-concept, and it’s interesting to note that it won’t affect AMD64 Windows platforms – or any current 32-bit Windows platforms for that matter, unless you’re running 64-bit emulation. All non-Microsoft OSes are of course, immune to this virus.

Danger to the average user as of right now: NIL.