Looks like there is a new virus out in the last couple of days with a new way of distributing it. In fact I got an email for this yesterday and deleted it after inspecting it and not feeling right about it.
The email comes in and looks like it came from Microsoft. There is an image there to click and download Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7. If you click on the link it then downloads and attempts to install the virus.
I actually got one of these messages last night but things didn’t add up. IE 7 is out and has been out for sometime so why would I want to download a beta for it? I also looked at the properties of the message and saw that in the source it appears that there is an email letter written there. This email is invisible when you get the message. My guess is that this is there to fool SPAM filters, as it looks like someone writing an email with a picture instead of just send a picture hyperlink.
If you get an email with a link to download IE 7 Beta, delete it as soon as possible.
After seeing this last night, I decided to finally goes ahead and install AV software on my Vista PC. I had been going the last month without it (although it didn’t complain about it as much as XP SP2 did). Still to this date there are no security patches for Vista from Microsoft. Even the new animated cursor zero day attack that popped up today does not affect users with Outlook 2007 and Vista IE7 because of protected mode.
Here’s a link to a story on this:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/033007-new-virus-comes-disguised-as.html
Stephen
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