On Fri, 2004-08-13 at 11:47 +1000, Clare Pascoe Henderson wrote: > > My > > question to Clare is do you mean 'Hacker' activity by this , "spoof emails"? > > Not as I understand it. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that > hackers "log in" to a machine from outside and make it do what they > want. Spoof emails are caused by a virus on the machine. But that's a > pretty simplistic answer and the tech experts on the list may shoot me > down in flames :-)
Okay, Hackers are neither good nor bad by this simple definition. Most geeks would differ between hackers (people who like playing with systems to see how it works) and crackers (people who wish to crack into a a system to take control). The media doesn't get this so sometimes it's better to distinguish between white hats and black hats. White hacks know how to 'crack' you system, but use this knowledge for good - they are the ones who report vulnerabilities to 'the officials' and you should be thankful they do. Black hats would never report an exploit, expect to boast, and would use knowledge of 'cracks' to take control of your system. Virus emails are just one form of attack, and spoofing the sender is just one of the many methods used to make fighting the virus harder. Some 'cracks' are intended to 'use' the system, others just want to damage it. Many virus and worm attacks are actually used by spammers to install software so that they can use your system to send spam. Rodd ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
