Virus Alert!

In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 06:20:06 -0800, C J Campbell
wrote:

On 2007-12-14 10:31:45 -0800, Larry Dighera said:

On Fri, 14 Dec 2007 13:21:58 -0500, "Morgans"
wrote:

Microsoft Outlook Express

That will only affect those users who are ignorant enough to run
e-mail client program that automatically opens links embedded within
e-mail messages such as Microsoft Outlook Express.

Savvy users have nothing to fear.

Savvy users use Macs. :-)

I realize this is meant to be humorous, but ...

Does the web browser distributed with OSX (or whatever is current)
default to launching links contained within e-mail messages without
requesting confirmation from the user before doing so?

No.

Well, a couple of behaviors:

- Links in the body of the email are marked as such, you can click on
them if you want. They'll open (it figures you meant to do that). Social
engineering issues apply here. The default behavior is "no".

- If the email itself is html, it will display remote images or not,
depending on how you set up mail preferences. I keep that turned off by
default; if I want to see them, I can click on the marker where they are
to see the image. The default behavior here is also "no".

- All links will display their actual target if you hover the mouse
pointer over them. (There certainly a lot of oddball addresses that
claim to be "Paypal.com".)

On Sat, 15 Dec 2007 15:01:52 -0800, Steve Hix
wrote:

- If the email itself is html, it will display remote images or not,
depending on how you set up mail preferences.

Html e-mail is a needless waste of bandwidth, and an unconscionable
security hole perpetrated by the clueless. I can see absolutely no
advantage it may provide over a link in a text e-mail message to the
html content.

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

Html e-mail is a needless waste of bandwidth. . .

Dumb question here. Scuzi.

Are we running out of bandwidth? If so, is it a Right-wing conspiracy - or
to be laid at the feet of the Left-wing media?

Rich "Donning flak vest" S.

"Rich S." wrote in message
...
"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

Html e-mail is a needless waste of bandwidth. . .

Dumb question here. Scuzi.

Are we running out of bandwidth? If so, is it a Right-wing conspiracy - or
to be laid at the feet of the Left-wing media?

Rich "Donning flak vest" S.

Yes, it is/can. How could you even need to ask?

Peter :-))

In article RBM8j.102$Uq4.46@trnddc06, John Mazor wrote:

"John Mazor" wrote in message
news:jwM8j.9980$rZ3.4647@trnddc07...

"Morgans" wrote in message
...

"Stefan" wrote

Serious virus warnings are *never* distributed by e-mails like the
one you posted.
Actually, this e-mail itself can be considered a kind of virus,
because it fills
mailboxes, wastes people's time and probably causes some friendly
christmas mails to
be deleted unread.

Actually, I would not say never.

Where I work, there are a lot of computers networked together, and a
lot of people
bringing things (files and software) from home and sticking into
them, and that adds up
to a great chance of something undesirable getting into the system,
and spreading if a
warning is not passed.

That is how I got this warning, and admittedly, I did not spend as
much time checking
on it, as I would have done if I had been at home.

This may have been bogus but there is some valid history behind these
things. Back in
the DOS days any way that you could get the victim's PC to execute
just two lines of DOS
commands would have been fatal:

cd C:\
delete *.*

Now that I think about it, all it takes is

del c:\*.*

It's been a while since I had to know DOS commands.

Of course all that either of those command sequences did was delete
the _regular_ files in the top-level directory of the first hard-disk.

Since the top-level directory has a (small) fixed maximum size, people
who 'knew something' would not put _any_ regular files directly in
that directory, the only thing there would be other directories. plus
the 'hidden/system/read-only' system files. For these kinds of people,
a 'del c:\*.*' did absolutely _nothing_, even if you suppressed the 'do
you really want to do this?' prompt. _when_ the extra switches became
available, the _really_ dangerous command was "format c: /q /y"

I used to make a habit of renaming the "format' command to something else
just to ensure that 'something wicked' couldn't do that.

Html e-mail is a needless waste of bandwidth, and an unconscionable
security hole perpetrated by the clueless.

Actually, it's perpetrated =on= the clueless, by presumably very cluefull ISPs and internet software writers.

Jose
--
You can choose whom to befriend, but you cannot choose whom to love.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.

On 2007-12-15 19:03:13 -0800, (Robert Bonomi) said:

In article RBM8j.102$Uq4.46@trnddc06, John Mazor wrote:

"John Mazor" wrote in message
news:jwM8j.9980$rZ3.4647@trnddc07...

"Morgans" wrote in message
...

"Stefan" wrote

Serious virus warnings are *never* distributed by e-mails like the
one you posted.
Actually, this e-mail itself can be considered a kind of virus,
because it fills
mailboxes, wastes people's time and probably causes some friendly
christmas mails to
be deleted unread.

Actually, I would not say never.

Where I work, there are a lot of computers networked together, and a
lot of people
bringing things (files and software) from home and sticking into
them, and that adds up
to a great chance of something undesirable getting into the system,
and spreading if a
warning is not passed.

That is how I got this warning, and admittedly, I did not spend as
much time checking
on it, as I would have done if I had been at home.

This may have been bogus but there is some valid history behind these
things. Back in
the DOS days any way that you could get the victim's PC to execute
just two lines of DOS
commands would have been fatal:

cd C:\
delete *.*

Now that I think about it, all it takes is

del c:\*.*

It's been a while since I had to know DOS commands.

Of course all that either of those command sequences did was delete
the _regular_ files in the top-level directory of the first hard-disk.

Since the top-level directory has a (small) fixed maximum size, people
who 'knew something' would not put _any_ regular files directly in
that directory, the only thing there would be other directories. plus
the 'hidden/system/read-only' system files. For these kinds of people,
a 'del c:\*.*' did absolutely _nothing_, even if you suppressed the 'do
you really want to do this?' prompt. _when_ the extra switches became
available, the _really_ dangerous command was "format c: /q /y"

I used to make a habit of renaming the "format' command to something else
just to ensure that 'something wicked' couldn't do that.

I always thought the most wicked command in DOS was "restore." I fell
victim to it myself, and I know others who made the same mistake. It
does not restore anything.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor

"C J Campbell" wrote

I always thought the most wicked command in DOS was "restore." I fell
victim to it myself, and I know others who made the same mistake. It does
not restore anything.

I had never heard of that one. What *does* it do?
--
Jim in NC

On 2007-12-16 01:48:28 -0800, "Morgans" said:


"C J Campbell" wrote

I always thought the most wicked command in DOS was "restore." I fell
victim to it myself, and I know others who made the same mistake. It does
not restore anything.

I had never heard of that one. What *does* it do?

Sorry. I meant RECOVER. It renames all the files on the drive to just a
sequential number and moves them all to the root directory. So you end
up with all the files in the root, no subdirectories left (they were
renamed, too), and all the files have names like 000123.REC,
000124.REC, 000125.REC, etc.

It is intended to recover all the readable files on a drive that has
bad sectors. It should be used with a filename argument, such as
RECOVER [path][filename] and it will recover the usable parts of that
file.

Recover was eventually replaced by SCANDISK, which was somewhat less
dangerous to use.

The DOS RESTORE command restores files from a backup made with the
BACKUP command.
--
Waddling Eagle
World Famous Flight Instructor