Dear Campus Community,
By now many of you have seen a number of suspicious e-mails that have
appeared in your mailbox since yesterday. All of them have mysterious
attachments with files ending in .scr, .pif or .zip. The most common one has a subject line of "Hello" and a zip file attached.
At this time this appears to be a zero day worm. This means is that the worm is so new that McAfee does not have a DAT file new enough to detect it. Therefore, if you open the attachment you will get infected.
The good news is that infection can easily be avoided by simply not
clicking or opening any suspicious attachments. Please Do Not under any circumstances open an e-mail attachments that you are not expecting.
Remember that just because the e-mail is from a familiar address does
not mean that that person actually sent it. Hackers can fake the "From" line. If in doubt send an e-mail to the person asking if they really sent you the attachment before you open it.
--
Michael Carlin
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Office of Information Technology
Director of Infrastructure and Support Services