Unsolicited messages

Although it could be viruses or a Trojan that is sending your address book to somebody, it is not difficult to get hold of or guess names for a mailing list. When the person sends the mail he or she simply change the name in the sender field to whatever. Spoofing e-mail sender names is fairly trivial; there are even web sites that will allow you send an e-mail and pretend to be whoever you want. I have had e-mails that appeared to come from colleagues in this case somebody had infected the mail server and got hold of its address book.

If you suspect it is a virus then a firewall like Zone-Alarm can detect that something is access the Internet that is not an application you have specifically allowed to do this. It is not full proof because a rouge application can pretend to a legitimate one.

Secondly a decent virus scanner should detect the presence of a virus/Trojan. If you have one active then search for all the files on your PC with an 'X' in them. This should force your anti-virus program to check every file.

The best course of action is to delete them as you have done.

You may want to look at this entry in Wikipedia

ATB Rotf

quote:

Originally posted by BigH47:

Is there a virus type thing that can copy address books?

Yes, but it does not mean that your family's laptops are the source. It could be that the address came from another machine / user that had received an e-mail from them.

Am not sure whether it is a virus or a trojan that causes this, but whilst Macs tend to be less vulnerable I still run a piece of SW that lets me know my port activity. It also lets you see which of your applications likes to phone home!

Huw

Thanks ROTF it's not a major problem. It seemed suspicious that the sending list included obvious "one way" addresses as if the address book had been copied.Mind someone might have just "send all" or something.

Huwge

What virus/spyware SW would you recommend to use with Mac?
Apart from the firewall that comes with Safari should I use anything else?

Cheers - John

I use an application called Little Snitch to see what's sniffing at the ports - freeware iirc.

I recently started to use intego's antivirus software as I had been sharing some excel sheets with quite funky macros. No virii detected, but occasionally it recognizes a Windows virus or Trojan in spam. From a common sense perspective I use this less to defend my Mac but more to make sure I pass nothing on to friends or colleagues that have Windows.

Thanks Huwge!
I've spent my computing life battling with malware & hackers,
so the in-built security of Mac is confusing for me.