I've received several reports this morning that the Explore Zip email
virus is making the rounds and has struck several list subscribers.
Please be cautious when opening or executing file attachments.
This particular virus/worm spreads by sending itself as a reply to an
email message. This is particularly dangerous because the
message appears
to be a reply from a message that you have sent to a specific
individual.
In our case, the virus appeared to be a response to a specific
request for
information that was posted to this list.
The current virus message says something to the effect of "I have
received your email and will reply ASAP, in the meantime please
review these zipped documents". When executed the attached file
begins overwriting Word and Excel files. The name of the file sent
by this particular worm is "zip_files.exe".
If you should receive this message the best course of action is to
delete the message without opening the attachment. If you have
already opened the file attachment you should contact your IS staff
immediately.
A side note: We will more than likely be seeing more of these
viruses in the coming months. Many of these viruses exploit the
features of MS Outlook and Outlook Express in order to propagate.
Some of the newer worms/viruses will execute when an Outlook
message is previewed. These are particularly dangerous because
it's so easy to preview a message in the Outlook environment.
More info on the Worm.ExploreZip virus:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/worm.explorezip.pack
.html
