CSU Fresno Email Virus Alert

A new, widespread e-mail virus is circulating on student, faculty and staff accounts at Fresno State and many other places. It has various Subject lines such as “You have received A Hallmark E-Card,” “A friend invited you to twitter” or “Jessica would like to be your friend.”

These are not legitimate messages but rather, a virus that will infect your computer. Do not open the message or the attachment and do not forward it. Simply delete it from your Inbox.

Do not open any attachment received from amazon.com, hallmark.com, hi5.com or twitter.com until you can be absolutely certain that the message and attachment are legitimate. At the current time, the most common names for the virus attachments are "postcard.zip" and "invitation card.zip."

ITS staff at Fresno State are working with our antivirus vendor to disinfect our systems. We have taken steps to make sure no new messages come into our e-mail system and we’ve stopped outgoing messages from campus that contain these messages. But your computer can still become infected if you open one of the attachments. Be cautious in opening attachments.

If you already have opened the attachment, please send a message stating that to security@csufresno.edu. Do not forward the infected message.

This new virus “harvests” all e-mail addresses from your local address book (contacts in Zimbra are not affected) and then sends the virus to those addresses. Even if you did not open the attachment, your friends might have.  Since the virus does harvest all local address books, all of your contacts are likely to see an increased amount of junk mail that will appear legitimate.

Major e-mail providers, such as Google and Yahoo, have taken immediate steps to limit their exposure by blocking all e-mails from sources that have been shown to be infected with this virus.  Because of this, it may not be possible to send to some Gmail or Yahoo addresses. ITS staff are working with these vendors to remove their blocks now that we have taken the step of preventing further spread of this virus.

Please be advised that this issue is not related to our Zimbra e-mail and calendaring system. It is infecting many e-mail systems throughout the country.



Richard Boes

Director, ITS