Please be aware that there are several new Virus/Spyware threats hidden behind the links attached to and associated with “Delivery Status Notification (Failure) messages. There has been a major uptick in the sending of these messages and many anti-spam and anti-virus gateway programs are not blocking these messages because the sender is random and the threat is contained in a linked site, not in the message itself.

In your outlook inbox, they look something like this:

The purpose of legitimate notifications is to inform the sender that a message they tried to send did not go through. The danger here is that these look exactly like the real thing. People are clicking the link to see what message they sent that got bounced back and the link executes virus code that infects the machine.

Centrend’s clients are protected with Antivirus/Antispyware software that will block the threat even if the user does click the link. However, even with the best protection possible, the safest practice is to never open an email message if you don’t recognize the sender and/or if you don’t know why you are receiving it.

-Paul
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Paul LaFlamme
President & CEO
Centrend, Inc.
508-347-9550 x115