Virus from competitor's email address

[pedrodepacos]

Our e-commerce store is less than a month old. We're off to a promising start and I would like some suggestions or opinions on the following matter. I received a virus attachment from a competitor's email address. I don't open attachments plus my virus protection program picked up the virus and removed it. I realize that this company may not have intentionally sent me a virus and they could be completely at the mercy of someone else who has the virus on their system. What are the chances, however, that this company has intentionally tried to sabatoge our business? Is this a common occurance? Has this happened to anyone else? How should I respond to this company? I didn't even know about them until this happened. Any suggestions or opinions would be appreciated.

[gertrijs]

The most likely thing that has happened is that a prospect (or customer) of both you and your competitor is infected by a virus.
The virus sends emails from the prospects computer to you and spoofs the From to be your competitor.
Good chance your competitor is now wondering what to do about YOU.

Gert

[jim_w]

Check the IP numbers in the email header and I'll bet you find that it is NOT them that sent the virus. I get that stuff a lot lately and have noticed that the IPs are from the Pacific rim nations mostly. I hope that they are protecting our private information being sent to them due to 'out-sourcing' better than they are protecting their own computers.

[pedrodepacos]

I tracked down the IP address in the header and I now believe that it was sent from a distributor who has contacted me recently with a business opportunity. I appreciate your suggestions. I guess I should have realized this considering how stupid it would be to send a virus without spoofing the email address.

Speaking of email spoofing, I did a lot of research on it last night and the one conclusion I came to is that there is pretty much nothing we can do about it. If someone, for whatever reason, wants to spoof our email address, we just have to accept this as part of having a business on the Internet. My question is, does this happen a lot? Do unscrupulous companies use this technique to discredit their competitors? It seems so simple to do that I am now expecting a backlash of people sending me emails saying that I've sent them spam or a virus or some derogatory comments. And my only course of action is to respond to all of them and explain what email spoofing is, which I am sure not everyone will buy, causing our company to lose credibility in the eyes of those people.

[Corey Bryant]

And keep in mind, your distributor might have the virus. That virus then went thru the distributor's computer & sent you e-mail to all the e-mail addresses in his/her address book.

There is not much you can do about spoofing. it is very easy for almost anyone without any programming knowledge to set it up to make it say it was from you to you.

-Corey

[CernyM]

With the current plague of virii going around, the best strategy is to just delete any emails with virus attachments and forget about them.

The headers are all forged, and you have no real idea where it came from. The fact that it appeared to come from a competitor doesn't mean that it actually did, it could easily be a coincidence.

You'll probably also start to see bounce messages from virus scanners letting you know that some email you sent had a virus attached. If the target is an address you don't recognize, just ignore it - your address has been spoofed.

Just keep your virus scanners up-to-date, a firewall in place, and the OS at the latest patch level and you'll be about as protected as you can be.

[andy_boyd]

Just to continue on from the wise words of CernyN, using a good spam filtering email clients will help you. I would recommend the Thunderbird client from Mozilla.org, it's 100% open source and totally free! If you're on a Mac then Mail.app will do just fine. :)

However, no matter how good your email client may be at filtering out all the infected rubbish some will get through. I find that it is helpful to use your hosting webmail and delete any obvious junk / virii directly off the server.

[tomda]

Lastly, I also received lot of emails from my own domain names (amd from all alias and even the [e-mail]) with exec. attachment.
I know these are spams but I was wondering if I should inform my server-provider. Can he really do something about it?

Thanks

[Corey Bryant]

A few months back when we were getting hit with one virus - I looked at the IP headers & saw they belonged to PacBell. I called them to inform them. After about 5 phone calls - someone finally picked up the phone & understood what I meant. Most would not speak with me because I was a not a customer. He gave me an IP address to send the info to. Within one hour, I was no longer receiving any e-mails and I was receiving about 50 e-mails every hour.

-Corey