Beware of Those Greeting Card E-mails - a New Version of the Ecard.exe Virus

The following is a true account of my recent experience with a variant of the Ecard.exe virus. This is a nasty little bugger that has been going around for months, and I had two computers at work that were infected. To make matters worse, I couldn't find a single Antivirus or anti-spyware program that could immediately identify the problem.

Most of the viruses that infect a user's machine were put there by that user, unbeknownst to them. This particular one took advantage of their curiosity by making them think someone had sent them a greeting card, and when they followed the links to read this supposed card, it turned their PC into a zombie. By zombie, I don't mean the computer started stumbling across their desk like Lindsay Lohan in a bar parking lot, but rather it began using the machine to send out spam mail.

Spammers have used variations of these type programs in the past, and what they do is turn your computer into a host that sends out spam messages for them. On the two machines I found infected, it was sending messages out at a rate of several per second, and the computers were barely able to do anything else.

We first realized there was a problem when the computer's screen began to literally fill up with outgoing message scan notification windows. Symantec Antivirus is set to scan every message sent by the PC, and this virus was sending so many at once that the scanner couldn't keep up.

This type of virus has been around for quite some time, and since it's inception it has taken on many different forms. The one that I found was, at the time, undetectable by every virus and spyware scanner I ran on the machine.

It's quite disheartening when you run full scans using Symantec Antivirus, Trend Micro's online scan, Spybot, and Ad-Aware, and they all tell you that the system is clean while my screen is still flooded with outgoing spam messages. All I could do was unplug the network cable and wait until somebody figured out how to fix the problem.