Spoofed e-mails spell ‘MyDoom’

By Rachel Hernandez
Staff Writer

Are you getting strange return messages in your campus e-mail account for messages that you never sent? If you are, it is probably because someone has been spoofing e-mail addresses from UNCP to hide their real identity.

“It’s just like if you send a letter from home and you write your address in the upper left hand corner…there is nothing stopping a person from using your return address to send letters, the same thing can be done using e-mail addresses,” said Dr. Maurice Mitchell, chief information officer and associate vice chancellor for information resources.

These spoofed return email messages are remnant of the MyDoom.A or MyDoom.B virus, according to Mitchell. The MyDoom.A virus, ingeniously named by the perpetrator, was originally aimed to bring down the web site of SCO Group, a Utah based software company.

“MyDoom.A was the fastest propagating virus that we have ever seen, it propagated around the world in a matter of minutes,” Mitchell said.

The attack successfully overloaded SCO’s system and shut down their website. A more unsuccessful MyDoom.B virus was intended to do the same thing to Microsoft.

At this point, UCIS recommends that students just delete these types of messages, since there should no longer be a virus attached to them. UCIS regularly uses McAfee Virus Software and pushes up-dates to all campus computers. Mitchell said it is especially important for students with personal computers to update their virus software because they are still at risk of passing the MyDoom virus to others.

“It is sort of like…get your Internet shots,” said Mitchell.

He said that as soon as an infected computer is turned on, the virus will send out a whole slew of email messages to everyone in the address book.

For help on this or other computer problems, you may contact University Computing at 521-6260.