Posted: 05/29/2002
It appears that our website may have been attacked. I received an email from someone that had received a virus infected document which was supposedly authored by me. The subject of the document was "END XXXCOUNTER CODE" and it contained an infected file attachment by the name of "any.exe". I've neither authored any such document nor had I ever heard of this particular receipient.
I've been informed that what's likely happened is that there is a script which scans the web harvesting email addresses from "MAILTO" links. It then uses those names in return addresses of virus infected emails. If you receive a suspect message please delete it immediately and (if it has my email address listed as the sender) let me know you've received it. In an attempt to avoid the problem in the future I've eliminated my email address from the "index" of our website. To my knowledge this has been the only occurance but depending on how this develops I may have to take further action.
While on the subject of hacking, about a month ago there was an incident with one of the links on our website. What happened was that a linked website had apparently been discontinued and some undesirable website picked up the abandoned url and redirected the unsuspecting surfer to their site. Upon notification of the problem it was easily dealt with by simply deleting the link. With that in mind I'd like all users on this site to be on the lookout for any invalid links on our "links page", please notify me and I'll delete them immediately before someone else has a chance to detect and misuse it.
Len