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Answers
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What are Virus emails?
The most common method of infecting with a PC today is by e-mail.
By coming up with an enticing subject and/or faking the address that the virus email is coming from, the email virus tries to get the user
to open an attachment to the e-mail. If the user does this, then their PC will become infected.
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How do they Work?
Once the virus has infected your computer, it trawls through your files to find email addresses to which it can send on it's virus payload to.
It the begins sending virus infected emails. To confuse users, it often fakes the "from" address, so that even though the infected computer belongs to
bob.johnson@emailaccount.com, the virus find the email address of his friend, peter.pan@emailaccount.com and makes the messages look as if they are being sent from
that email account.
This confuses people as to who the source of the infection is, as well as sending bounced messages to the wrong PC, so that bob.johnson@emailaccount.com
may not even know he is infected for quite some time.
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How do I know I've been infected?
The only certain way is to fully scan your computer using an up to date virus program.
When I say up to date, I mean that the "virus definitions", which allow the virus scanner to catch new viruses, must be as recent as possible.
The fact that someone has received a virus infected email from your computer does not mean you are infected (the from email address could be faked by the virus), but it is obviously a good idea to run a scan.
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What can be done to stop them?
All emails passing through our systems are scanned for virus infections.
If an infection is found, the attachment is removed and the subject of the email is prepended with {Virus?}. Further details will be included in the safe portion of the email which is then sent on to you.
Our virus software is updated hourly for new virus definitions so it can catch the newest viruses ASAP.
There are also more secure email programs than the standard Outlook/Outlook Express. We recommend the use of PocoMail for which Cloch Internet is Irish agent.
You should view this service as complimentary to a regularly updated anti-virus package and Internet firewall that should protect every computer
these days.
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I have concerns about viruses, can you help?
We are not responsible for the sending or receiving of emails through our systems, and we cannot provide assistance regarding virus infected computers.
However, if you are concerned about emails you are receiving, please forward them to support@cloch.ie and we will investigate.
For further information of viruses, we recommend the following sites:
Computer Security Response Center
McAfee
Trend Micro
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