Virus Sent to Calmail Accounts
[Let me begin this post by saying that Calmail is a gigantic piece of crap and I don’t understand why anyone in their right mind would use it and it annoys me to no end that the university requires that my Calmail address is the one they keep on file so therefore that is the place that professors send all their announcements.]
Most of you probably got an e-mail recently to your calmail account about a password change that contained a zip file with a big bad virus. [Screenshot here.] Since it’s the weekend and no one is around to comment, here is a little speculation, and hopefully some questions that some of you might know the answer to.
1. I was told by someone (who was very sure of himself) that this wasn’t just a traditional spam thing, but that the spammers behind this actually had obtained our e-mail addresses before they sent this thing off. Does anyone know is this was some type of identity theft/hacking thing or was it just a random mass mailing? Apparently everyone lots of people with a calmail accout got the virus.
2. How are college students (Berkeley, no less) not smart enough to realize that if you get a random e-mail about a password change with a zip file, you SHOULDN’T DOWNLOAD THE ZIP FILE. A friend of mine did download the virus, and after a solid day of work and anti-virus software, it still isn’t fixed.
3. When did the people behind Calmail realize what was going on? ResComp knew about this, so surely there must have been some sharing of information. Did CalMail consider putting a message on the front log-in page alerting people to this virus, or perhaps sending everyone a message telling them not to download the file?
Tip: you can set your Calmail account to forward to your preferred email account.
Comment by Matt — October 8, 2005 @ 5:10 pm
Obviously, you don’t know what you’re talking about, considering you don’t even use their forwarding system. Also, if it was “some identity theft thing,” who the fuck steals emails then sends trojans to them? Selling them for spamming purposes is a better idea, no?
Whoever you’re getting your information is also full of shit, since I haven’t received this spam-virus in my CalMail account.
As for point 3 - I do fault the tech staff for not putting up a courtesy warning for this, although you have to keep in mind this is one virus out of infinitely more. I place more blame on the retards of point 2.
Comment by Anonymous — October 8, 2005 @ 6:48 pm
To add to the thing about identity theft + email thing, in case someone says “So they can match the emails to passwords, duh” - I’m sure clicking around profusely on Facebook would net more emails (and more gullible-looking people) than bothering to hack a database.
Comment by Anonymous — October 8, 2005 @ 6:53 pm
Calmail always has a really long lag time between clicking ‘delete’ or ‘next’, regardless of if you’re using dialup or on-campus.
One bug I wish they’d catch is that if someone sends a huge file and your account goes over the limit, the system seems to endlessly post a warning ‘your account is oversized. please reduce your stored messages’, but every time you click yes, to acknowledge, it shows the same message again, and you have to go to a pine interface to actually get rid of a email with big attachment.
Comment by show — October 8, 2005 @ 7:16 pm
Or you can just set up Outlook or Eudora to download your Calmail messages directly from the serves and then not have to worry about the interface. One of the great things about this is that it enables you to stop bitching about everything for the few minutes it takes to set up.
Comment by Anonymous — October 9, 2005 @ 12:00 am
If you’ve got trouble with the calmail interface, use a client as the poster suggested (Thunderbird is also a good alternative, www.getthunderbird.com). It’s also got built in junk mail filtering (sure, it’s not incredible, but what can one do) and folder management.
Also works on Windows, Mac, or Linux; has extensions, themes–it’s good.
Comment by Anonymous — October 9, 2005 @ 4:15 pm