Q: I just received a strange/vulgar email from a GroupWise account that I know is not used anymore. I think that account has a virus.

Q: Somebody called me and told me they received a strange/vulgar email from my account. Do I have a virus? Is there anything I can do to prevent messages from being sent from my account?

A: You should never really trust the "From:" line in the emails you receive. This information can easily be faked. This means that, if you receive an email that is apparently from your best friend, but it contains language or content that you know your best friend would not use, you should be suspicious that the "From:" line has been forged. You may want to follow up with that friend through email or some other means to confirm that he did, in fact, send it.

It is a little imprecise to talk about an account being infected by a virus. Properly speaking, viruses infect computers, not accounts. In some cases, viruses may perform some actions under the disguise of the user who is logged into an infected computer, so it may be helpful to track the activities of a certain account in order to trace the virus back to its origin.

In the case of the Bagle email virus and others like it, this is specifically not the case. There is no connection between the account names that appear in the "From:" line of the emails that these viruses create and the names of users that might be logged into the infected computer. These viruses generate random "From:" and "To:" addresses by scanning files on the computer for strings of characters that look like email addresses (i.e., the familiar "user@host.com" format).

If a virus email appears to have come from your address, it is because it was sent from a computer that had your address in a file on that computer somewhere, not because it was sent from a computer that you were logged into. There is nothing that can be done to prevent the "From:" line from being forged in this way.

Q: Is there a virus going around right now? Because I just received a strange email.

A It's probably best to consider that there is always a virus "going around." On any given day, there are thousands of computers on the Internet that are infected with a virus of some kind. When those numbers jump into the millions, computer security web sites start announcing a new virus "outbreak." If you receive a strange email from somebody you don't know, with an executable attachment, there's a very good chance that it was sent from a computer that is infected with a virus. This might happen at a time when some new "outbreak" is in the news, or it might be an isolated incident, when virus activity is otherwise relatively low. I guess the best answer is, if you just received a virus email, then a virus is indeed "going around."

Above all, never open email attachments from someone you do not know.

To help the System Support office track virus activity within ODNA departments, please forward any suspicious emails to virus@support.und.edu.