Virus From the CIA?

Hopefully you know better than to ever open an attachment from a strange email address. If you don’t, listen...don’t ever ever EVER do that. There is a pretty decent chance you’ll get a virus if you do.

Just in case, though, I figured I would mention some emails I got over the last three days. Over that period of time I got an email from mail@fbi.gov, department@cia.gov, and office@fbi.gov. All of them say the same thing, that I had visited over 30 illegal websites and that I needed to fill out the attached information.

Of course, getting anything from any government agency like this is a little intimidating, but being the good cyber-dude that I am I looked up the email address of one on Google and voila, they carry known viruses!

Just in case you didn’t know, the "from" address on your email is not necessarily where the email address is from. I don’t know how these virus and spam dudes do it exactly, but I know from a programming perspective it is very easy to send email from an address that is not your own. I get emails from addresses like maria@lexelsoftware.com or frank@christonomy.com occassionally. I have those domains reserved, and I know that we don’t have those setup on our mail servers. Well, others can send emails that say that they are the originating addresses. Unfortunate.

So, the moral of this story is, don’t trust the "from" address on potential spam and virus emails. Be very wary of opening strange attachments.