Re: CS>virus reaction From: Jonathan B. Britten Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 19:56:53
> I recently received an interesting e-mail with an "attachment." > The content of the message suggested to me the sender had some > ideas about my research interests, including flax oil, which I > have discussed nowhere but this list. > I was interested by the message, read it several times, and > finally deduced that it was another clever spam with some kind of > virus in the attachment. Bottom line: the message below is right > on track, and my nagging suspicion about the e-mail I received is > that someone who uses or monitors this list -- maybe just as a > silent observer --- is tailoring infected messages designed to > deceive. I hate to say that it could be mere coincidence -- but my > observations correspond with those below. > JBB Hi Jonathan, I have also received many emails with virus attachments from this list, with subject lines that indicate the sender knows me from information gained by reading the list. I know for certain the person uses the Silver List since I use a different email address for each list and can tell where it comes from. The virus is easy to spot - just look for the letters "MZ" in the binary file. This signifies the attachment is an executable file, and windows will run it. Fortunately, I do not run the latest version of Windows, so I am immune to any viruses or trojans. I also wrote a spam program that analyzes the email headers and looks for attachments. It discards any email that is not on my whitelist, or that fails the analysis. For the throwaway email addresses, I use http://www.spammotel.com/ I used to use http://sneakemail.com/, but they have a quota system and simply discard any email that is above the quota. They never told me they were doing this, and I lost quite a few important emails. Whenever I put an email address on a web page, I use an email encoder, such as http://www.proles.net/emailencoder/ This changes the regular email tag from <a href="mailto:your email address">Some Info</a> to <a href="mailto:... I've used this for several years, and never received a single spam harvested by a robot! So watch your attachments, use throwaway email addresses, use proper anti-spam software, and encode your email address on web pages. This will go a long way to minimizing the problems with viruses and unwanted spam. And for the ultimate in protection, run Linux or use Win 3.11:) Best Wishes, Mike Monett -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver List archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] OT Archive: http://escribe.com/health/silverofftopiclist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
