IP: SirCam and Mac users -- why you shouldn't use Outlook

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>
>>SirCam virus and the Mac: a follow-up
>>
>>Yesterday, we reported that SirCam virus/worm could indirectly affect Mac 
>>users by flooding a mailbox with mail sent from PC users infected with 
>>the virus. We received several reader replies on this matter:
>>
>>
>>It gets worse Gedeon Maheux (of The Iconfactory) writes: "According to 
>>Symantec, Sircam not only gets its emails from people's address books, 
>>but also from the cache files of web pages stored on the infected 
>>computers. This further increases the odds of getting infected email. 
>>Like MacFixIt, The Iconfactory is getting just slammed by this."
>>
>>SirCam and confidential documents Another MacFixIt reader found: "This 
>>virus explains why starting yesterday I began receiving emails from a 
>>business competitor of mine. There are attachments to the emails that 
>>contain business correspondence of my competitor computer. This 
>>correspondence contains price quotes, customer names and addresses etc.! 
>>[To read the files, I had to decode the attachment using YA-Decoder. I 
>>then could open the decoded attachment in Virtual PC 4, using WordPad, on 
>>a disk image especially created to open unknown files.]"
>>
>>SirCam and Virtual PC Frank Hatcher cautions that the virus can affect 
>>Mac users if they run Virtual PC or other PC emulator software. He 
>>writes: "My wife got the worm via an email from a friend as a xls 
>>attachment. When she tried to open it a message popped up that said the 
>>file was a windows application file. So she opened our Virtual PC program 
>>and tried to open it there. Well it attached itself to the SirC32.exe 
>>application and essentially made the VPC drives unusable. I had to trash 
>>the whole VPC folder. During the contamination she noticed that the 
>>windows OE program started up. My guess is that the worm was trying to 
>>send out email - fortunately we only use the Mac OE and had no addresses 
>>in the windows version."
>>
>>
>>Although some users have claimed that the virus can directly corrupt 
>>files on a Mac, Symantec contends (and we concur) that this is not possible.



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