Why is our district receiving so much German spam?

Most of us receive spam (unsolicited/unwanted email). But there has been a surge in the number of spam messages lately - many of which appear to have German language subjects. This is the result of systems infected with a variant of the Sober mass-mailing worm (computer virus) sending multiple messages to any email addresses they can harvest from the infected computers. The messages appear to be from a variety of senders in different domains but these are "spoofed" (faked) by the infected computer. In four days I received over a hundred Sober-generated messages that appeared to be from different email addresses. Further investigation revealed they were all generated by only two infected computers.

Recent variants of Sober spread links to news articles and information supporting neo-nazi, right-wing viewpoints. The news agencies posting those articles have disavowed involvement with the emails. Some have even offered public apologies for links to their articles being spammed into inboxes around the globe.

• Click here to read an explanation of spam or to report a spam scam (Internet fraud).

• Click here to read a Washington Post article about the German spam (Sober) problem.

Can we prevent spam?

German messages which appear to arrive from many different computers are difficult for our district email server to recognize as spam. It is relatively easy for us humans to distinguish the German subject lines from the English subject lines. But we haven't taken the time to teach our server to make that distinction. However, we are implementing some new spam-rejecting procedures which we hope will help reduce the number of unwanted emails we all receive. (I doubt we will ever be able to eliminate spam entirely.)

You, too, can help reduce the amount of spam reaching your inbox. The NPS Spam Manager allows you to customize how our server handles your email messages before they are forwarded to your inbox.

• Click here to read more about the NPS Spam Manager.

Am I infected?

If you receive an email containing one or more links from a computer infected with the current variants of the Sober virus, then the email itself will not infect your computer. But you should always keep in mind that any attachments you open and any web sites you visit could attempt to infect your computer with a virus or install unwanted software on your computer. For that reason I recommend against opening any email attachments you were not expecting in advance to receive and against downloading/installing any software you are not certain is free of viruses, spyware, or other malware. Antivirus software protects your computer from surreptitious infections but it allows you to install software on your computer. It's up to you to ensure the software you install - or approve for other people or web sites to install - does not contain any unadvertised negative consequences.

The antivirus definitions on networked UDT-XP computers are updated every time they boot up (power on) within our NPS network. You should regularly update the virus definitions on other (non-UDT-XP) systems to insure protection against the latest viruses. If you suspect your computer may have a virus you should run a full system antivirus scan to clean it.

• Click here to read more info on viruses & malware.