 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Rob
Date: 2001-10-24 03:22
I hope I'm not breaking any rules here. I'm sure I will be notified if I am and I apologize in advance.
FYI...
This evening I received an email from Oleg Products advising of new products, offers, etc. The email included an attachment called BlackBat. Upon attempting to open it I received a Norton virus warning stating that the attachment is infected with a virus.
I sent an email to Oleg Products to let them know.
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Author: Eoin McAuley
Date: 2001-10-24 07:53
As a general rule, you should never open any attachments on e-mails, as they are the number one way in which viruses are transmitted. The only exception is if you know the person who sent it, and you know that they sent it. It is not enough to receive an e-mail from your friend Joe and say "Joe sent that so it must be OK". If the header line says something like "Have a look at this", then it could easily be sent by a virus on Joe's PC.
I only open attachments if they come with a subject line which clearly persuades me that the attachment is for me personally and was sent personally by a person known to me.
If the attachment is an EXE file, I think you should not open it under any circumstances.
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Author: Kirk
Date: 2001-10-24 20:50
Good advice !! Even if I have the slightest qualms about whatever I get in emails I will delete it without a second thought. If my friend asks about it, I feign ignorance and say "oops, I deleted it...what was it ?"
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Author: beejay
Date: 2001-10-24 22:13
All the above goes for Word documents or .doc files as well.
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Author: MsRoboto
Date: 2001-10-25 00:25
Actually beejay is correct but we should go further and say...
All of the above goes for all MS Office Documents including Spreadsheets, PowerPoints, or any other productivity tools that allow scripting.
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Author: Bob Curtis
Date: 2001-10-26 00:24
HooRay for the Macintosh!! We have so few virus problems like you mentioned. You may say all you wish about the Macs, but we are almost totally virus free, not that we aren't careful like everyone else. There is something inheirent in the MS system that just seems to invite virus invasion.
Bob Curtis
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Author: Terry Horlick
Date: 2001-10-26 00:44
I suspect that the reason the Mac has fewer problems is that more folks use the PC. More users of the PC are inexperienced and more likely to open infected attachments. Also hackers can have more fun and infect more machines if they target the weaknesses in the PC.
On the other hand I suspect that MS operating systems have more vulnerability to this kind of stuff.
I wanted to mention that you can be fooled when there is a double extension. I got stung once when my computer received an attachment with a long name and a JPEG (.jpg) extension which should have been safe. It turns out that the name was just long enough that my machine (PC running MS Outlook) truncated off the second extension so something like "NAME.jpg.exe" came across on my screen as "NAME.jpg". I was fooled and got a worm (sort of like a virus, worms are the more common infection via e-mail) infection. So you may want to save the file and read the complete name and extension before deciding if you will erase it or open it.
Be aware that a lot of the worms/viruses are not detected by the anti-virus programs. I keep an up to date Norton on my machine and it misses at least half of the infected attachments I get sent to me.
Terry
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2001-10-26 00:49
It's not specifically the OS, but the fact that the programs Microsoft supplies can be scripted to work woth other programs - and scripted very easily.
With power comes danger. It just happened to be MSoft who captured the market and made interprogram scripting possible on a grand scale. Macs haven't had that exploited nearly as much.
Remember, one of the most famous Internet worms, the first one that took the Internet down to it's knees,. exploited a Sun/BSD bug with a buffer overflow, and there are a lot of explots still being done on Unix. Macs just aren't popular enough ;^)
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Author: Bob Arney
Date: 2001-10-26 17:16
I agree, "worms" are sometimes more dangerous than a virus. They can clog the system and turn your day into a "horrendus event." I installed "Pest Patrol" and it swept my drives and found about 13-15 worms and "ad-ware" sites.
Bob A
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