This is off-topic, but we’re obviously all computer-savvy people, so I thought it was worth doing my little bit to get the word out.

There’s a nasty, nasty virus e-mail going around right now. This isn’t one of those silly phishing letters with half the words misspelled that screams out ‘fake!’ This is an entirely believable-looking e-mail that purports to come from MSNBC’s “Breaking News” e-newsletter (which does really exist, by the way), and apparently, the same e-mails are going out supposedly from ‘CNN E-mail Alerts.’ I’ve started getting five or six or these MSNBC ones a day, and the headlines vary. This latest one to the left has a headline that says the Beatles are getting back together — what, you’re telling me YOU guys wouldn’t want to read that story? I gather that if you click on the link, you just go to a ‘page not found’ Webpage on the MSNBC site. But according to this article on Snopes, what has actually happened is that you’ve activated a virus called “Storm worm,”  that has been around for awhile with different methods of delivery.

The FBI got involved in one of the earlier versions of the virus, and here’s how they explained what happens:

Clicking on the link downloads malware onto the Internet-connected device, causing it to become infected with the virus and part of the Storm Worm botnet. A botnet is a collection of compromised computers under the remote command and control of a criminal ‘botherder.’ Most owners of the compromised computers are unsuspecting victims. They have unintentionally allowed unauthorized access and use of their computers as a vehicle to facilitate other crimes, such as identity theft, denial-of-service attacks, phishing, click fraud, and the mass distribution of spam and spyware. Because of their widely distributed capabilities, botnets are a growing threat to national security, the national information infrastructure and the economy.

Botnets with botherders? This sounds like something from a sci-fi graphic novel. But having these things popping into my mailbox every couple hours is just freaking me out. Did I ever click on that link? I don’t remember! I clicked on the one that was supposed to let you unsubscribe, but that one doesn’t do anything. I’ve tried to designate the incoming ‘MSNBC’ e-mail as spam, but they’re always coming from different sources — likely from other infected computers — and so they just keep coming. And are there other e-mails going out right now from my computer? I don’t even know.

As the Wicked Witch said as she melted away, “What a world, what a world!”