Re: possible system intruder XP


"Alun Jones" <alun@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:oJudnVmcfNJhKe7ZnZ2dnUVZ_s-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Marvel wrote:
I was at work and checked my e-mail on my laptop there was a new mail
message to me from my home computers hard drive (the home computer
was on, no one was home) the subject line read short joke and the
text of the message read check it out and it had half of my password,
next there was a hyperlink to a site.
I dont know where to start protecting

You also don't know that the message was really "from my home computers
hard drive", unless it contains information that can only have come from
your hard drive.

Think of email as being a little bit (but not a lot) like regular postal
mail - except everything is sent using postcards, with no envelopes to
shield the content. How do you tell whether a message came from someone
you know? You look in the top left corner of the postcard, where the
sender is supposed to write their address.

So, if I send you a postcard, and in the top left-hand corner of it, write
"President George W Bush, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC, USA",
does that mean that when you receive it, it came from the President?

I don't think so - for starters, I'm ineligible to hold that position, no
matter what I might change my name to.

Similarly, when an email comes in to your computer, you should distrust
everything about it until such time as there is anything that confirms its
source.

Always seek the simplest explanation for what happened - in this case,
unless unique information from your hard drive was revealed in this email,
assume that this was just a random spam.

Alun.
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Alun, I agree with you... the reason I stated it in my was from my hard
drive is, instead of c: or h: or etc... my hard drive was named Ralph (which
I changed at once) Maybe they wanted me to know they knew.
Also it was from my roadrunner e-mail account (I use OE) to my work account
kinda odd instead of being from Marvel@roadrunner it was just plain Ralph,
and still it didn't contain any more than that.
Thanks



.