Be Careful with E-Mail Attachments

Just a few days ago we had a customer wrote in to our support department. The customer had received an email from "admin@" their domain name and had an attachment. Unfortunately the customer hasn't been keeping up with the latest trends in spammers that attempt to forge their emails (also called spoofing - see previous blog entry here: http://ajtdesign.com/blog/2006/09/e-mail-spoofing-huge-nuisance.html). What this email contained was an attachment, which the Client opened and his computer was immediately infected by a worm which began using his computer as a "spam relay" meaning his computer was turned into a virtual spam machine. Unfortunately we are unable to assist with removing virus's from a customer's computer - not just because "that isn't our job", but because we are not "computer technicians" and honestly do not know how to fix issues like this. A call to the Geek Squad was in order. (It's a common misconception that we are computer techs - when that is far from the truth. Supporting web sites, web servers and e-mail hosting is very different than fixing a computer.)

So to make a long story short, never open an attachment from something that appears from your own domain name unless you know who sent it. If it looks fishy - it probably is. Also, just know that AJT will never send an attachment with any of our announcements to our Client base so should you ever get anything that doesn't have our company logo, physical address, phone numbers, etc. then dont open it. Granted most computers would have immediately deleted this email upon download from the server, this particular customer was using an out-dated version of McAffee. Our entire company uses Norton Internet Security and we keep our virus definitions up to date - so really, if something like that were to come in to us, our Norton would get it before we could even have made the mistake of opening it. By following these two simple rules you can rest assured that you will keep your computer virus free!

If you are interested in a third line of defense that will intercept Viruses before they even make it to your computer, we recommend a spam filtering service that works as a middle man not only blocking 98% of all spam, but also blocking 100% (guaranteed) of viruses. Check out our Web Hosting section for more information: http://www.ajthomas.net/services/hosting.html.