Another strain of the Beagle e-mail virus began infecting UW-Madison campus mailboxes Tuesday, this time under the guise of seemingly legitimate senders.
According to Division of Information Technology spokesperson Brian Rust, the virus attracts recipients by \spoofing"" a valid e-mail address like administration@wisc.edu and warning of security problems. When the recipient opens the attached file, it infects the person's machine.
However, Rust said the virus only propagates e-mails to other machines and does not cause permanent damage to computers.
Usually, DoIT is able to stop such viruses from reaching UW-Madison mailboxes, but in this case it is impossible because certain aspects of the e-mail prevent DoIT's spam-blocker from reaching the infection, Rust said.
""There's an attached zip file that needs to be opened with a password and they put the password in the e-mail message,"" Rust said. ""Having a password protected zip file keeps our spam filters from being able to open it and filter it out.""
As a result, DoIT is filtering out and deleting all zip files sent as attachments from campus e-mail. To notify correspondents of valid e-mails with zip file attachments, DoIT is also sending a text-only copy of the zip file to its intended recipient before deleting it. This will curb the potential problem of, for instance, a student not realizing a classmate has sent a file because DoIT intercepted and deleted it, Rust said.
Rust said students should have the most current antivirus protection on their computers, which will restrict the virus strain from infecting their machines, but not block the inundation of infected e-mails.
Students can get updates on the status of computer viruses via Internet at my.wisc.edu, and the DoIT and Helpdesk home pages, Rust said, adding that e-mail viruses are a continually evolving problem on campus.
""This is just another strain of the same virus and there will probably be more that are even more insidious in than this,"" Rust said.
