How does Bugbear spread and what does an infected email look like?
Viruses in the past have used a standard message they think will entice you, hence everyone learnt to look out for a ‘love letter’ or the fabled nude pictures of Anna Kournikova. The latest viruses aren’t that simple – they do use some standard messages, but they may also look through your old emails to pick (at random) a message you have sent before. Thus the message can sometimes seem quite genuine and there isn’t an obvious pattern. The only distinguishing feature is that the attachment is always 50,688 bytes (49.5k) in size. Another trick is to disguise who sent the email. Bugbear appears to make up a new email address to claim to be the author of the message. The virus is able to do this because the ‘from’ field of an email is completed by the creating software and the system relies on this software being honest. We recently received a large amount of returned, infected emails from Norman.Dennis@hcs-management.com. We have never employed anyone of this name or operated this addres
