STORM VIRUS

If you are getting a lot of Emails with phony "you have a greeting card from somebody" links, and are finding strange attachments in your reception folder that seem to be PDFs but won't open (and have names like complaint.pdf, new-specification.pdf, wire-instructions.pdf, new-job.pdf and might even include bits and pieces of your Email address), then you are under attack by the STORM virus, the worst in Internet history.

Virus 101: Do not open attachments if you don't know what's in them, and not click on links from unsolicited Emails from people you never heard of.

This virus began earlier this year with fake warnings about storms in Europe, and expanded from there. Like most viruses, if it gets into your machine, it reads your address book and Emails itself to everybody you have an address for. The servers are also sending millions of copies a day to known Email addresses, and to commonly-guessed email addresses (e.g., sales@anywebsite.com).

Unlike viruses that are just pranks, or that damage your hard drive, this one is intended to turn your computer into a zombie, part of a million-machine "botnet" run by a criminal gang of "bot herders" somewhere not in the USA. The gang has boasted of their accomplishments and has offered the services of their botnet to deluge target websites with hundreds of millions of phony emails. If you want to make sure that your greatest business rival takes no orders on his shopping cart during his current inventory cycle, these guys can (for a fee) make sure that your rival does no business at all. Your rival may already be hiring them, if he's a bigger crook than you are, since hiring these gangsters is as big as crime as they one they do for their customers.

If you go to the greeting card link, or open the PDF and get a "this PDF won't open, it's not a PDF" message, then your computer is probably infected. This could be a major problem, since STORM is hard for anti-virus software to stop or to eliminate. Web cops say it's that toughest and smartest virus ever seen. It hides multiple copies of itself in the darndest places, and if you remove it, it might just re-install itself. Maybe it doesn't matter to you, since the gangsters are probably just as interested in keeping your computer healthy and working as you are. After all, they are using your computer a lot more than you are using it. You may observe your computer running slower or stalling out on web connections. That's STORM, using your connection to mail itself to everybody you ever emailed, or maybe being directed by the gangsters to mail something to somebody ... for a fee.