[61003] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Email virus protection
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (JC Dill)
Wed Aug 20 18:57:58 2003
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2003 15:46:48 -0700
To: nanog@merit.edu
From: JC Dill <nanog@vo.cnchost.com>
In-Reply-To: <20030820210736.GA61404@mail.webmonster.de>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
At 02:07 PM 8/20/2003, Karsten W. Rohrbach wrote:
>There's quite a lot of usable stuff out there. Many Win32 users have
>switched to Mozilla which seems to solve 100% of the Outlook-specific
>attacks which account for... hmmm... 100% of the malicious email
>messages of the last 6 months.
Unfortunately, that's not true. My father has to use Windoze because
several software programs for his industry (Real Estate, specifically
managing rentals) only come in Windoze flavors. He stays away from M$
client software whenever possible and was using Mozilla for email (until
yesterday, I'm getting him started on Eudora). His email software doesn't
automatically open attachments for him.
He knows better than to manually open random attachments that don't look
like something business like, but a few weeks ago one caught him during the
vulnerable period (after the virus started making the rounds, before he had
updated the virus definitions) and managed to pretend to be a type of file
he *does* expect in his day to day business (an "application"
attachment). Oops.
Now he finally *really* understands why I'm adamant about frequently
updating the virus definitions (I presently have his antivirus software set
to check for updates every 4 hours) and having a strong firewall, and not
loading unnecessary applications on his work computer.
jc
