Here You Have A Case Of The Mass-Mail Worm Returning

The alerts and buzz surrounding an e-mailed worm with the subject line "Here You Have" and the promise of porn is a reminder that old cyber-tricks don't ever really go away. Remember the "I Love You" virus? Thought so.The last couple of days have seen a fair amount of buzz and rising alert levels surrounding an e-mail-borne virus that travels under the subject line guise of "Here You Have". (Some versions use the subject line "Just For You.")

The e-mail and its variants offer links to purported PDF files or porn sites, none of which are, of course, what they purport to be. Click the link and an attempt is made to persuade you to install a screensaver. Dall for it, and the worm mails itself to everyone on your contact list.

Sound familiar? Think back about a decade or so to when the "I Love You" worm (aka "The Love Bug") took the world by storm -- and took, by some acounts, the world for up to $10 billion in lost productivity and disinfectant costs.

Around the same time, the Anna Kournikova worm also wreaked a fair amount of havoc -- and did so by way of, of all things, a "Here You Have" subject line.

This latest mass-mail worm has reportedly tagged quite a few major corporations and institutions, Disney and NASA Houston evidently among them, overloading servers with spam as the worm replicates and transmits itself.

The way to avoid this one is, of course, by following one of the most basic rules of e-mail, a rule that goes back at least as far as "I Love You" and Kournikova:

Delete unfamiliar e-mails without opening them. Don't click on links in unfamiliar e-mails if you do open them (which you shouldn't).

The return of the spam-bomb mass-mail worm after all this time shouldn't have caught so many by surprise: given enough time, every cyber-tactic that's worked in the past is likely to be tried again, perhaps with tweaks and enhancements, perhaps not.

But that doesn't mean that any of us, including you and your employees have to fall for the tactics. We've all had, after all, ten years or so to learn better.