After the virus flood in my inbox.

I had always assumed that if I didn't use Outlook or Outlook express,
and I never opened attachments from people I don't know, that I was
safe from worm attacks.

Well, you know what happens when you assume.

It turns out that there are OTHER ways for the W32.Swen.A@mm worm to
attack. One is through an HTML document (web page, e-mail, or even
usenet posting). Another is through Kazaa. (It exploits a security
flaw in the software).

What's worse, it doesn't matter if you delete the file. It makes
changes to your registry and no longer NEEDS the original file to
spread itself.

It also doesn't need for you to be running anything. It has it's own
SMTP (Send Mail Transfer Protocol) program and can send itself out in
the background without you even knowing!

PLUS (!!) it disables many popular AntiVirus programs from being able
to remove it.

Once it's on your computer, it mines your machine for e-mail addresses
in Kazaa, IRC programs that support DCC and logging (such as mIRC),
and (of course) Outlook (and Outlook Express) e-mail and newsgroups.

If you don't have ANY of these programs on your system - it will just
e-mail it to the only e-mail address it knows - YOURS!

I installed Norton AntiVirus and it found 633 instances of this thing
in various folders all over my computer (each one with a different
name for the file), not including the several hundred a day that I
deleted out of my e-mail attachment directory.

I hope this got them all, but just to be sure, I'm ran the following
utility:

http://securityresponse.symantec.com...oval.tool.html

IMPORTANT: Read the instructions before you use this utility.
I had to make two changes before it would work on my system!!

I also switched from Kazaa to Shareaza. Kazaa installed a ton of
spyware programs on my system. I cleaned them with Ad-aware 6.0.
(It's freeware). I got it from http://www.download.com

I'm no longer getting 100-200 copies a day in my inbox, but I'm still
getting 20-50 a day - but now I'm confident that none are coming from
ME.

- T.D.
Doing my part.





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Theodore David Shadow <>

T.D. Shadow