Has anyone been receiving more spam or virus threats?

by MitaMan on 04/30/2004 22:31, 53 messages, last message: 05/17/2004 05:07, 18969 views, last view: 05/18/2024 21:40

From MitaMAN,
This may seem a strange place to talk about this but I really need to know. I'm fairly new to CUBE, been coming to this forum only since january 2004. I never had trouble with spam, attached viruses, returned mail that I never sent, etc... until I started coming to this forum. Every day I get tons of "fake" email with viruses in attachements. Thank goodness my ISP checks for this along with the preventive stuff I do. Nothing bad has happened to my computer but, I feel someone, somehow has stolen my cyber identity from this forum. My surfing habits have not changed (except for CUBE), I don't visit porn or crack sites.
Does anyone have a similar problem? I enjoy coming here to read what you guys say and to post my own opinions. I never could have made my (3) maps without the information on this forum.
Am I crazy to suspect I've been "violated" on this forum? Any opinions?
MitaMAN

   Board Index   

#1: no

by jcdpc on 04/30/2004 22:44

i haven't received anything strange. and who would have "violated" you? altough i think something strange may be going on. that monkeyman fellow came out of nowhere and i've read through the forums a few times while i gathered my website and features lists and i never saw any post from him. there might be more people like him who use cube and browse the forum, but don't post anything. altough why would someone want to spam/virus you? to prevent you from making really cool maps? (except for those subtitles ;^) jk ) anyway i don't think your mails from here.

reply to this message

#2: ..

by makkE on 04/30/2004 22:45

no u ain´t crazy
I ´ve had this too, just like 4 weeks after i visited this forum i had like 50 viruses from fake mails like webmaster@planetquke and cs stuff...
it stopped after bout a week...
maybe there´s some asshole getting email-adresses from this forum...
i must say there were 1 or 2 guys that weren´t too friendly here.. so i replied not too friendly...and i had a feeling like someone wouldn´t like me and spam me...well as i said it stopped after a week or so...theese were the first viruseses i ever got...hmm :)
just delete em all frequently, maybe it stops....

reply to this message

#3: ..

by ph0ok on 04/30/2004 22:50

i get a lot of spam and viruses every day, so i maybe didn't notice it :)

reply to this message

#4: ..

by driAn@otherMachine on 04/30/2004 22:52

Last time, i got some emails from my brother, my father, etc with virus attachements.
I asked them if they opened any attachments from any unknown people.
They said yes! So i went to our second computer (running on win), on this machine, my brother,dad,mother are always working.
I updated the antivir software and ran any anti-spyware tools. These found a worm (i forgot his name) and also a trojan.
I deleted this crap and explained which attachements they mustnt open...

Jop, malware bases often on the 'stupidity' of the users...

My machine wasnt infected.
-> Linux
;)

reply to this message

#5: Re: ..

by makkE on 05/01/2004 00:14, refers to #4

luckily my email provider already knew those worms i got... but still annoying ...

reply to this message

#6: Re: ..

by MitaMan on 05/01/2004 01:45, refers to #5

Hello from MitaMAN (again),
More virus / trogan horse / worms information. Just checked my email & my ISP said there's a worm going around that affects winxp & win2k. Checked my computer with updated macafee virus scan and found nothing. then downloaded a free virus scan from here (maximum pc mag said it's one of the best, it's free!!)
http://www.grisoft.com
called AVG free. installed it and found (10)!! worms on my machine. fixed the problem. I just want to let my fellow CUBE buddies (even though we never met) know about this great FREE virus scan software. I'm a "easy going dude" but I hope all the hackers burn in hell.
MitaMAN

reply to this message

#7: yup

by Drakker_ on 05/01/2004 02:47

I got a big increase of spam recently (from like 1 a week to 15 a day). I suspect this forum... but of course, the fact that my email address is available all around sourceforge and on the montréal linux user group mailing list archive doesn't help... but it's been available like this for months and spam just started all of a suddent when I got like 15 in the same day.

The thing is that the email obscurity here can easily be countered...

reply to this message

#8: Re: ..

by jcdpc on 05/01/2004 02:51, refers to #6

i'm clean,but AVG scaned 18 gig of my 14 gig HD. so either
A) i have some weird worm that atttacks virus scanners
B) AVG has bugs
C) my hard drive is 5 years old and it's time to get a new one.
>fellow CUBE buddies (even though we never met)
i think part of the cool things about cube is the community, i've seen other engines and the forums seem like endless flamewars. after being here i feel encouraged to try new things in my maps (which are improving greatly thanx to Makke's advice and what i've read here)
>I hope all the hackers burn in hell. I agree virus writers are evil.

reply to this message

#9: ..

by Nekrodeth on 05/01/2004 02:54

When you post your ip adress is listed.Anyone can attempt to acess your computer and read/write files.This might be what is happening to you.

reply to this message

#10: Re: ..#9, IP address

by MitaMan on 05/01/2004 03:21, refers to #9

from mitaman,
Do you know the reason the IP address is (must be) shown? Now I feel like like my backside is exposed. I get the feeling from reading some of the replys to this thread I'm not the only one with problems. 99.9% of this forum is helpful, non-hostile, and friendly. I like the fact that we all talk freely, I'd hate to see some hacker spoil it for us. mitaman

reply to this message

#11: Re: ..

by jcdpc on 05/01/2004 03:25, refers to #9

maybe, i'm not sure how my network is setup, but i've got a router and everything has firewalls (i can't play cube online or use ICQ because i'm not allowed to open the firewall -need dad's permission, i know just ports 28765 and 28766...) anyway theres a big computer event going on this weekend near my house (the TrentonStateComputerFair) and i'll get a new hard drive real cheap (i got a new raedon 9200 for 50 bucks, it's a great event) and i need more space anyway, so i'll learn wheter its a hacker or not.

reply to this message

#12: potential suspects

by jcdpc on 05/01/2004 03:33

is it possible to see all ip's of people who visit this forum? then we seperate people actually post stuff from people who just browse, because it's probably someone who just browses, i highly doubt it's a CUBER. every post in this forum that is unfriendly has like 5 posts after telling the troll to leave. (see monkeyman, and shatterd star thread), maybe it's someone like that. it could also be some ip harvester program that just wanders random forums...
Stupid hackers.

reply to this message

#13: ..

by staffy02 on 05/01/2004 03:44

i got heaps of e-mails from people that i have never met about a month ago. Recently i had a worm and i had to delete it manually because i couldn't be stuffed getting an antivirus.Firewalls are more usefull.

reply to this message

#14: Re: ..

by Thalion on 05/01/2004 10:08, refers to #9

An old P100-32Mb with FreeBSD installed on it serves as a very nice router/firewall. Then you can forget about Blaster and all that =)

Oh, and concealing your IP address is "security through obscurity", which never actually works. You'd better make your system secure enough to withstand an attack.

reply to this message

#15: router

by Drakker_ on 05/01/2004 14:37

I prefer hardware router, software routers, however good the OS its running, will never be as safe as an hardware router because there's all kind of services that must run to take care of the computer devices not found in hardware router. Less is a lot more when it comes to routers.

I highly doubt "hackers" will ruin your fun MitaMAN, its "crackers" that are evil... hackers are just very good programmers like Aard. :)

And if you dont want to bother with all the virus, worms and crap, just don't run windows. Install Linux or get a Mac, simple as that.

reply to this message

#16: Re: router

by Thalion on 05/01/2004 17:57, refers to #15

My router is not just a router... runs a caching proxy as well, does proxy chaining for me (to get past the institute firewall), and then I also use it to test-run my PHP stuff on Apache under FreeBSD since it's quite often what the target platform is.

"Services to take care of hardware devices" are just drivers - and those aren't exposed to the network, so it's pretty hard to remotely exploit a driver =) And services - well, I trust FreeBSD firewall enough for that. Otherwise, it's pretty stable - haven't crashed once yet (56 days uptime, I rebooted it once). And hey, it's fun =)

reply to this message

#17: Re: router

by D.plomat on 05/01/2004 19:56, refers to #15

Agree with Thalion, you can do more useful things like adding traffic shaping or similar, content-based filtering, which is unlikely to be done by a cheap hw router.

Also about things you think you have on an OS, if you don't need extra features, you can use a minimalist OS like i do: with busybox and a kernel on a 486, it's system is only 5Mb (and could even be smaller if i was less lazy ;)
...It doesn't host any service so a nessus scan of it is totally blank :)

And you shouldn't assume hw routers are invulnerable... several have known holes and probably Linux/BSD kernels are much more security-tested than firmware of those routers (which are sometime modified versions of those OSes and others, but you have less control on it than a host you build from scratch)

reply to this message

#18: ..

by Nekrodeth on 05/01/2004 19:57

mita-man just get a good firewall.Zone alarm is a good one,and has a free version too.FreeBSD and linux are more secure than windows,but if you have a good firewall you will probally be fine.If you are receiving all kinds of crap in e-mail you should not list your email when you post.Or just use a e-mail acount you don't care about,this is what I do ;)

reply to this message

#19: Re: router

by jcdpc on 05/01/2004 20:02, refers to #17

5 MEG! thats amazing windows is 100 times that!

reply to this message

#20: Free Anti-virus

by D.plomat on 05/01/2004 20:04

AntiVir Personal edition is cool also, i prefer it over AVG.

http://www.free-av.com/

However if you have a 'Server' windows version it'll refuse to install on it.

About the SPAM, for me it's the same as before i knew Cube. e-mails displayed are already - AT - NOSPAMed so mail collector bots won't get them here. Unless some loser manually collected them, they didn't got it from here.
About the virus, it's probably netsky, it choses random faked sender address when it sends itself, this also explains you receive "undeliverable mail", probably someone having your address on his machine is infected so sometimes the virus on his machine uses your adress when it spoofs the sender address, so when ISPs software filters out virus, they see those mails af if they were sent by you, and they send you the "undeliverable mail" message.

reply to this message

   Board Index