Forged Emails cause Computer Viruses

Spoofing otherwise referred to as "forged" emails are a common cause of today's computer virus surge.

Typical of this is when you receive an email from someone that you are familiar with when in fact it really is not from that person or company at all.

In other words, you get an email from your Internet carrier asking for you to reconfirm your account information but in all actuality it is just an attempt to get your password or other sensitive information.

The worm or virus uses the technique of "spoofing" where at random it chooses addresses from infected computers and can send you a tainted email with virus included and make it look like you sent it to yourself. The truth is that you are equally as likely to receive a "spoofed" email virus from someone you know versus someone you do not know. In the event that you receive an attachment of any kind or from anyone, do not open it but rather put it in a separate folder and email the person back that sent it to you and ask them if they sent an attachment and why.

Social engineering is another word for spoofing. In this process you would for example, get an email from your ISP and they are asking for you to go to another website and change your password. Believe it or not, many people fall for this scam everyday. The worst part is that there is no way to stop spoofed emails, all you can do is proceed with caution and use common sense. If the email looks like it might be fake, is insulting, asks for information, or just doesn't make any sense then do not open it under any conditions.

Spoofing is sometimes difficult to understand but people do it for a few different reasons such as they are sending spam and do not want to be liable for the anti spam laws and regulations, the email could be threatening or harassing, the email contains a virus and the sender believes you are much more likely to open it if it comes from So you could be sitting at home just reading your emails and you receive one that says your mail was undeliverable. Of course, you open it along with the attachment and it is empty. So you close it and go on about your business.

In the meantime, the virus has just used a spoofing technique and is now running a virus throughout your entire computer. The first thing that it will do is head straight for your email address book and harvest all of the email addresses that it possibly can to infest as many computers as possible.

Although the intention of the virus is to infect as many computers as possible through email corruption, many of these viruses can detect back weeks or months and see every web page that you have visited and steal emails from there as well as your Word files. The possibilities for further virus infection are endless.