Virus Warnings (especially badtrans)

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Jerry Feldman warned:
| Some of you on this forum use Windows.
| Lately, the W32.BADTRANS worm has been infecting a lot of systems. Discuss just received a
| couple of these within the past hour. Fortunately, the from address is prepended with an
| underscore (eg. gaf at blu.org becomes _gaf at blu.org) so mailman will block the postings. This is
| just a ward of cauthion for those unfortunate enough to be running Windows and even worse,
| Outlook Express.
| http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.badtrans.b at mm.html
| http://www.datafellows.com/v-descs/badtrs_b.shtml

The Symantec description is interesting.  It sounds a lot like a form
(or  prototype)  of  the  Magic  Lantern  virus  that has got so much
attention lately.  In particular, it installs keylogging software and
looks  for  likely passwords in active windows.  If it finds them, it
sends them off to some innocuous-looking email  addresses  at  places
like yahoo.com and excite.com.

Symantec is one of the companies that has been reported to be talking
to the FBI about making antivirus software ignore Magic Lantern.