[LINK] Identity theft virus infects 10,000 computers

[Jan Whitaker]

At 09:03 AM 3/08/2006, Stilgherrian wrote:
> > website page (HTML email)?
>
>Yes, it's true.
>
>In their default configurations, both Outlook Express and Outlook have the
>following behaviour: If you select a message in your inbox -- that is, not
>"open" it, but just, say, hit the down cursor key to make it the current
>message -- then its contents appear in the "preview pane". That means the
>email goes through the HTML parser to generate that display -- that is,
>effectively opening the email even if you didn't "open" it in its own
>window.

It is also advised when using any email client not to have a preview window 
open, but to work from the directory listing only. Also turn off any 
automatic 'run' or HTML display if possible.

I had occasion last week to run a full virus check on my laptop and was 
surprised to see a virus listed in the scan. What it turned out to be was a 
captured email that had been trashed and the viral attachment deleted that 
was a filename.exe.zip file. I would never have opened that file, but it 
was reassuring to find out that AVG caught it and handled the problem 
without any danger to me at all.

Cheers,
Jan


Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
commentary: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/

'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, there is 
no plant.' - JW, April 2005
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