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Microsoft Virus Spam: SoBig.F
If you're being barraged with Microsoft virus spam emails today, this story notes that it's a flare-up of an older Microsoft virus in a new, improved form. Yay for trustworthy computing.
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"No I don't."
Because of course they're running anti-virus software. And of course the definitions have never ever been updated.
These same people decide when their PC is two years old that it's just "too screwed up" and go buy and brand-spanking-new one with the same flaws which they will proceed to bugger up in a month in a half.
I wouldn't last a week in tech support.
Won't work. Dumb people are incapable of a realistic self-evaluation. Here's why.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
...that just because you're not using Outlook or Outlook Express, you still may be vulnerable to worms or email viruses?
All it takes is one user to click the attachment who has an LDAP-enabled address book of the entire company, and poof! you're screwed.
The only sensible way to kill these worms is to block them at the mail server. If you block them at the mail server, you don't have to try to train people or keep hundreds of anti-virus clients up-to-date. Do yourself a favor and set up XWall if you have Exchange (this is about the coolest spam-blocker/email filter program I have ever used, BTW) or SpamAssassin/MailScanner if you have Linux/UNIX. This will save you a ton of headaches in the future, and won't require you to worry about hundreds of clients being up-to-date as much as focusing on whether a few email servers are up-to-date. (Block the standard Microsoft "bad executable" list and you should be fine.)
Seriously, in the year 2003, there's no excuse for "But my 400 clients weren't up-to-date!" Block these things at the server, which is something you as the network administrator should have complete control over, and which is where the worms should have been blocked to begin with.
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that's just the thing.
.exe so the user doesn't except it to be an executable because as you say 'but users are used to the whole 8.3 format where executables end with ".exe"'. some even use holes to hide the payload in files that wouldn't normally have executable code at all.
this like others uses other extension from
showing the mimetypes/what the email reader is going to _do_ with it would be much more useful than just displaying the name of the file and telling the user to click on it.
they're educated usually alright, mis-educated.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
In their zeal to sell the house, MS gave the keys away.
No application scripting language should be able to perform in an "untrusted" mode. There is no reason for it but due to functional designs someone at MS came up it has to be there. Someone demanded that Office documents integrate into Outlook seemlessly and this is what you get.
No one in any Unix environment will believe this message:
Attached is a perl script with my message in it. Please extract and run it to read it.
However MS has made a buisness of making people believe using a computer is as easy and as safe as using a toaster. So you get hackers who can apply a little social engineering to cause a disaster chain of events. Users are more than happy to click click click away when instructed.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.