Do you receive lots of virus attached e-mails a day?

[Pet Terry]

Today I got this.

What caught my attention was the email address...

...

[Wormmaster]

I don't think that Mr Colossal would do something like that...
It must be...
A HACKER!!!!!!!!!
AAAHHH!!!!
Nooo!!!
Virus, get off me!!!
NOOOOOOOO!!!!

[Ishmael]

I see lot's of exclamation marks... is it a virus? Oh, it's Wormmaster... no worries then

I had gotten this email from "System Anti-Virus Administrator" that claimed:

Attention: NOPEtkx24@hotmail.com


A virus was found in an Email message you sent.
This Email scanner intercepted it and stopped the entire message
reaching its destination.

The virus was reported to be:

the W32/Netsky.c@MM!zip virus !!!


Please update your virus scanner or contact your IT support
personnel as soon as possible as you may have a virus on your system.


Your message was sent with the following envelope:

MAIL FROM: NOPEtkx24@hotmail.com
RCPT TO:   NOPEmartinfive@mercurylink.net

... and with the following headers:

---
MAILFROM: NOPEtkx24@hotmail.com
Received: from mailq.mercurylink.net (HELO ASSP-nospam) ([206.107.249.183])
         (envelope-sender <NOPEtkx24@hotmail.com>)
         by qmail3.mercurylink.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with SMTP
         for <NOPEmartinfive@mercurylink.net>; 26 Mar 2004 21:25:09 -0000
Received: from 64.21.104.144 ([64.21.104.144] helo=mercurylink.net) by
 ASSP-nospam ; 26 Mar 04 21:25:01 -0000
From: NOPEtkx24@hotmail.com
To: NOPEmartinfive@mercurylink.net
Subject: hey
Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 16:25:22 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed;
   boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0006_00005C12.00005B69"
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Assp-Spam-Prob: 0.00000


---

Does anyone know can Hotmail actually send virus' by itself to addresses you've never heard off?

(I added NOPE's to make sure not spam will result... just in case...)

[Fuzzpilz]

No, but your average mail virus is quite fond of spoofing headers using any addresses they find, meaning that people tend to receive virus mails "from" people who aren't in fact infected. Some antivirus programs, unfortunately, ignore this and spam those whose addresses have been abused in this way with rejection messages ("Hey, you should update your antivirus software! SIGNED: Some virus scanner or other, wink wink nudge nudge"). It's quite annoying.