For many years, we posted on this page virus and worm alerts we received from Symantec (Norton), McAfee, or other sources. We have stopped doing that, first, because these days it seems alerts are issued too frequently for us to keep up, and second, happily more and more internet users seem to be getting the message that it pays to surf protected.

That said, here is a link to Symantec's “Latest Threats & Risks” page: http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response

If you cannot afford to purchase an anti-virus program, there is a free alternative: AVG AntiVirus at http://free.grisoft.com/. I have never used it, so I cannot speak from personal experience; however, it looks legitimate (whatever that means). At least, it may be better than nothing. For links to other “cyber security” related sites, please click here.

Norton's Safe Web is a free service to check the safety of any website. Simply go to Norton here, and enter the URL of the website.

On TZF's home pages, we have placed alerts concerning the practice of some spammers to generate malicious email messages containing the email address of others, like us, in the “From:” slot so that their messages seem to have been sent by someone other than themselves.

The practice is called “spoofing”. As we understand it, the best hope to curb this unsavory practice is for domain owners to participate in the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) program, and we have done so. Hopefully, it will help.

Here is some of what the SPF site says about this phenomenon:

Today, nearly all abusive e-mail messages carry fake sender addresses. The victims whose addresses are being abused often suffer from the consequences, because their reputation gets diminished and they have to disclaim liability for the abuse, or waste their time sorting out misdirected bounce messages. You probably have experienced one kind of abuse or another of your e-mail address yourself in the past, e.g. when you received an error message saying that a message allegedly sent by you could not be delivered to the recipient, although you never sent a message to that address. Sender address forgery is a threat to users and companies alike, and it even undermines the e-mail medium as a whole because it erodes people's confidence in its reliability.

The Solution: SPF. The Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery.

About.com has a page about spoofing, particularly as it applies to a worm called “SoBig.F”. The discussion there includes suggestions in identifying the real senders of all spoof messages. For that, please click here.