Re: Virus (Swen?) opened automatically?

From: Phil Weldon (pweldon_at_mindspring.com)
Date: 09/27/03 

Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 22:33:45 GMT

That dialogue box is warning you that the attachment should not be opened,
but instead, saved. If you upgraded to Internet Explorer from Internet
Explorer 5.X using certain installation options, the exploit vulnerability
may still be there. At any rate, you should certianly have a good antivirus
program installed and keep the virus definitions updated on a daily basis.

There are a lot of implications in the effects of this worm. The damage is
not so much to the infectioned systems and networks, but the damage visited
on users with uninfected systems, caused by floods of infected e-mail
messages that amount to a DOS attack on mailboxes.

Among further implications are the political ones. This type of attack is
going to give a great boost to the effort to find efficent virus and spam
identification tools. The same type tools (bayesian analytic engines, for
example) can scan e-mail traffic in real time, and reliably identify
ideological content. Some goverments are scanning and censoring e-mail now
(you can easily guess which ones those are) and some have plans do so, but
have suffered temporary setbacks (for example, Project Raptor in the USA,
run by Admiral Poindexter. ) This is a clear and present danger; discussion
about mandatory virus scanning of e-mail will involve a number of issues
like this.

Phil Weldon, pweldon@mindspring.com

"Gnam" <gnam_C_U_T_online_H_E_R_E_@email.it> wrote in message
news:bl2db5$7ace0$1@ID-173491.news.uni-berlin.de...
>
> "Phil Weldon" <pweldon@mindspring.com> ha scritto nel messaggio
> news:2q0db.15273$ai7.11936@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...
> > With Internet Explorer 6.X you can not be infected with THIS worm if you
> > don't open the attachment, not just the the e-mail body. Receiving a
> flood
> > of e-mail infected by the worm (the infectious payload is the attached
> file)
> > is no indicated that your system is infected, but rather that you e-mail
> > address has been harvested from an infected system or network.
>
> Okay, thanks for ansering but I was wondering why the "save/open" dialogue
> box opened without any of these mails being selected in Outlook.
>
> That's what got me worried.
>
> Bye and Thanks,
> Gnam
>
>
>
>

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