It's not a matter of virus killers on the servers. First of all, the
message base on the newsgroup doesn't exist in any one location. Instead it
is mirrored on hundreds of servers all around the world, hundreds of
identical message pools. Killing an infected message on one server does
nothing to remove it from all of the others. When you access the news
server you DL message headers or complete messages, depending on your
personal preferences. If your PC gets hit with a virus, as it infects it
scans your entire drive and retrieves ALL email address and newsgroup
references it can find - mailboxes, address books, internet cache, newsgroup
header files, temp folders, imbedded in word documents - everything. It has
it's own smtp server so it starts to send mail and newsgroup posts to
everyone and everything it's found - it also spoofs the return address,
substituting one of the addresses it found for your real return address.
Thus EVERY recognizable email address and EVERY newsgroup reference that it
finds on your computer gets hit with a copy of the virus. So when you
posted a message on the newsgroup, your return address was in the header.
Someone somewhere who reads a newsgroup that you post to and/or had your
address on a message was stupid enough to open the virus infected attachment
and their computer was infected. It immediately sent messages to you and
everyone it recognized. Not only that, hundreds of people are getting
infected messages that appear to have come from you since it uses the same
address reservoir for the spoofed returns.
--
Steve House
MS Project MVP
Visit
http://www.mvps.org/project/faqs.htm for the FAQs
