Looky here, Bob. I never accept gifts from my enemies. Never, I say!
I also habitually trash any message that looks like it is "official". You see I have a problem with "authority". So when I get a message from my ISP saying there is a virus on my computer, I trash it.
When I get a message from you with a subject of "I love you" and an attachment. I trash it.
When I get a message saying my account is past due. Especially, I trash it.
Ever dealt with a real computer virus, Bob? It does not need you to run it. It does not need the operating system to run it. It gets into the network and attaches itself to every thing. Every time you open a file it runs and copies itself to another file. It writes directories to hide in. It captures passwords and stores them in hidden directories to send out when you are connected. Your software starts crashing and your data becomes trashed because it is writing itself all over memory. At least these are the things the first one I had to deal with did. Luckily that LAN was not connected to the Internet or the company's business would have been everywhere. Furthermore, none of the available anti-virus software had a clue about it, much less being able to detect it at the time. It scared the hell out of me. As I said, trojans are innocuous.
--
Bob W wrote:
Hi,
Thursday, May 20, 2004, 1:42:16 PM, graywolf wrote:
Well, we can be kind of glad. You see trojans are pretty innoctuous, you have to be an internet idiot to get them. Worms are worse, and true viruses are a real bitch to deal with as they can latch themselves onto about any bit of data and get into your system without you having a clue and they usually do real damage.
if I were you I'd be very worried about trojans. These are precisely the type of programs that can intercept credit card numbers and passwords and send them to the bad guys.
Complacency is the biggest security risk of all. During WWII some German officers were so confident that their codes were secure from cracking that they failed to take elementary precautions, and gave the codebreakers at Bletchely precisely the break they needed.
You should assume that your system is breakable and take appropriate precautions.
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
