Viruses and Spoofing

Regarding the original message from the postmaster at the U.S. Courts site, many of the current viruses and worms "spoof" the sending address. What originates from a computer that contains the virus or worm looks like it comes from another. If your antivirus software is up-to-date and the virus definitions are up-to-date (and it sounds like they are) AND it does not detect any viruses you can consider your computer to be pretty secure. Of course, the three viruses that were found are bad things, but if Norton AntiVirus said it cleaned them then you should again be okay. I would say you can safely say that you do not have the Netsky virus.

A bit more about the "spoofing" issue. What happens is these viruses send out e-mails to everyone who is in the address book on the infected computer, choosing one of those addresses to use as the sending address. The spoofing is done very cleanly so it's often difficult or impossible to tell that it did not originate from the user it says it did. In addition, those messages contain a copy of the virus itself so it can infect the recipient's computer if they do the wrong thing, like try to open the attachment or follow other instructions in the e-mail. The bar has been raised considerably. Back when we first recorded the "TechTalk" program addressing computer viruses they were problematic but didn't cause severe problems. The current lot of viruses do harm to the contents on the computer. It's ever more important to use the antivirus software.

From your description of your setup I'm wondering if you have the System Realtime Protection enabled. This is a feature of the Norton/Symantec software that runs continuously and is vigilant for any incoming viruses. This will let you know if a virus is contained in an e-mail message you receive, if there's an attempt by a Web page to infect your computer, or if something dangerous enters your system from any other form, such as a floppy disk or CD-ROM. I also cannot tell from your e-mail which version of the software you're running so I won't attempt to tell you how to enable this, but you may want to search for that feature and make sure it's enabled. . . .

Finally, another feature that may be available in your version of the software is the ability to check for updates automatically at a time of your designation. This will help to assure that you always have the most up-to-date versions of the virus definitions. Even with this feature enabled you should still use the LiveUpdate button periodically. However, if you have it check for updates on a daily basis at a time when you are usually using your computer you'll find you're kept most current. Symantec used to publish new definition files once a week on Wednesday afternoons. It's become much more frequent in the last couple of months.