North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Email virus protection

  • From: JC Dill
  • Date: Wed Aug 20 18:59:51 2003 
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