brobson said:
At any event, your Mac cannot be infected by any known Bagle or Beagle worms. All of these Windows worms spoof email addresses, so that bounces and Mailer Daemon warnings go to the spoofed address, not to the infected computer.
Yikes that's a lot of words.
Brenda
Then let's simplify it:
1. You can NOT be infected by ANY Windows-specific virus on Mac OS X.
2. Virtually all of these recent virus/worm/trojan (yes, they are different things) outbreaks work in a similar manner:
a. Victim must be running Windows
b. Victim must be using MS Outlook or MS Outlook Express for email
c. Victim frequently must be using MS Internet Explorer for browser
d. Virus exploits vulnerabilities in IE AND Outlook AND Windows to infect that machine.
e. Virus goes through the Victim's address book in Outlook/Outlook Express/Windows, and sends itself TO people in the address book pretending to be FROM someone ELSE in the address book.
3. People running virus scanners on mailservers (as I do) may have them set up to auto-notify the sender if a virus is discovered (I used to do this, but no longer). Back when infected documents sent as attachments were the primary means of virus propagation, this worked well -- it told people what the problem was so that they could clean up their act and know why their mail did not go through. For the last 2 or more years, however, this notification has caused more problems than it's solved, because the notification goes to who the infected mail PRETENDS to be from, not the actual victim.
4. Therefore, the victim here is someone who has you in their address book. The virus with which they are infected (a bagle variant) sent itself TO other people pretending to be FROM you, which led to the chain of events which you experienced.
5. Your AOL password being compromised is a different matter.
There are NO viruses for OS X.
Do you take weekly doses of chloroquine, pyrimethamine or halofantrin to prevent malaria? Why not? A mosquito infected with malaria *may* find it's way to you, so be prepared! Smart if you live in Africa or South America, dumb if you live in North America or Europe. The risk approaches zero, so the drugs are a waste.
IF any virus risk appears for OS X, then antivirus software (Sophos is the best) would be appropriate. Since there are NO viruses for OS X, don't wory about it.
