Security Alert — German Spam

New versions of a virus named Sober have been spreading across the Internet in recent weeks. These viruses have the odd behaviour of sending spam containing German propaganda.

Some key points are:

This spam does not come from our servers. Our servers are not infected.
Receiving spam from Sober does not mean your computer is infected. But someone you know probably is infected, and the virus got your email address from their address book.
If you only use Citadel Network email, you are very unlikely to get infected. Our mail server runs every incoming message through multiple virus scanners before the message is delivered to your inbox.
Virus scanning does not block these emails because they do not actually contain a copy of the virus.
Our servers have extensive spam filtering. Spam filters are very effective agains intentional spam, but what they can do against spam sent by viruses is limited.

If you think you may be infected with this or any other virus, there is a free online scan available from Trend Micro at http://housecall.trendmicro.com.

For those wanting more details, there are several in-depth articles available. Below are a few.