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hcarvas wrote:
> When I read your message, that is when it all happened. Is
> it coincidental? I don't know.
Yes, it was coincidental. As Jimo said, there was NO attachment
on that message. Nothing but the message text. You can look at
the raw content of the message and see that it contains no virus.
Sven Napolean Montessori <snm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > I suspect hcarvas received a virus from a third party
> > that had forged Ernie's name/address as its origin.
>
> This is undoubtedly true. However, the forger needed to know Ernies
> email and that this list was involved somehow, even if faked. There
> is a fair chance that Ernie has or had a "guest" and should do some
> examination of his computer's software.
No, if Jimo's theory is true (forged address from a third party),
then Ernie doesn't have to be involved at all except that his
name happens to appear in the third party's computer -- maybe in
an address book, maybe just in the inbox or outbox! The infected
party picked Ernie's name as the fake "From:" address, without
Ernie being involved at all.
Unless you see a message containing the virus, AND you can trace
the headers back to the sender's machine (which you can't do with
Olist messages because the eskimo.com listserv strips them),
there's no way to be sure where the virus came from. Most
viruses forge the "From:" header. And you certainly can't assume
that person X is infected because you happened to notice the
infection about the time you read a message from X !
As others have said, Microslop software is the major culprit.
Moving to Unix, as Alex has done, is one sure cure. But even on
Windoze you can be very safe if you avoid MS bugware. I receive
hundreds of emails every day, and I have for years. I have
**NEVER** been infected with a virus, in spite of receiving many
hundreds of them. I use Pegasus, a non-MS emailer, which isn't
vulnerable to all the security holes exploited by the virus
makers. Until last year I never even bothered to run an anti-
virus package, because my chance of infection was nearly nil.
This year I've also switched to Mozilla, to avoid all the script
viruses in IE, and I find I like it a lot better. All the
annoying popups have vanished, too.
Gary
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