follow up on earlier messages

[Marilyn T. Smith]

Our apologies for the emails you have received from Janet Fischer 
which were a result of a virus -- another machine took over Janet's 
email address and generated the messages (called spoofing). 
Unfortunately because Janet is a moderator of the postdoc list, these 
messages went through to the list - as soon as we noticed we shut 
down her computer and we are taking steps to correct this immediately.

Below is information from Computing Help which explains why the 
message appeared to come from Janet.

Again, sorry for the inconvenience,
Marilyn and Janet


The "From" address in e-mail is comparable to the return
address on a piece of snail mail.  It can be set to whatever the sender
desires, and is not necessarily accurate.

Spam, including virus spam, often forges the "From" header in
e-mail so that it appears to be coming from someone who has no relation to
the mail itself.  Often, viruses will pick a random address in the
address book of an infected user, set that as the "From"
address of the mail, and then pick another random address to send the 
message to.

These messages should generally simply be ignored.  Replying to
the sender is not useful, since it is likely forged.  The same applies
for bounce messages that claim you sent spam to someone else.  A virus
likely set your e-mail address as the "From" line, and the
recipient's mail server sent mail to you to tell you this, even though this is
useless.

If you know the spam or virus is coming from an MIT machine (as
indicated in the headers by the originating host, NOT the sender's
e-mail address), you can forward the message, without attachments, to
<mailto:security at mit.edu>security at mit.edu with a note indicating 
this.  Be sure to include the
full headers of the message.  Network Security will then look into
it and inform the owner of the infected machine, and possibly disable
network service to the machine.
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