Hello Hermine, On Wed, 1 Aug 2012 20:10:47 -0400 "Hermine Strand" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I'm serious. If I hadn't been using Pidgin for text chat, I would probably > now have an infected computer and a drained bank account. Details are in my > latest blog post as per my signature below. Pidgin is definitely getting a > donation right now! Who doesn't love Pidgin? Regarding http://earthatory.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/security-alert-how-pidgin-saved-me-from-being-hacked/ : 1. You mention that Pidgin crashed while the scammer was sending you what you believed to be the exploit. Well, Pidgin (or most other programs) should never crash, so it's also indicative of a bug (though it is better than being exploited, assuming the crash was not indicative of an exploit.). 2. "Security software" such as anti-virus/etc. cannot handle many types of malware including unknown malware, and polymorphic viruses - http://www.cknow.com/cms/vtutor/polymorphic-viruses.html , and you could always be hit by a more targeted attack. While there is no silver bullet for security, one good idea is to use more secure UNIX-like operating system (such as the *BSDs or some distributions of GNU/Linux) instead of Microsoft Windows (later versions of MS Windows have improved in security, but with every desktop user working as administrator - I'm not sure it's enough), and to work as an underprivileged user instead of root. ---------------------------- Regards, Shlomi Fish > > > > Hermine Strand a.k.a Lawry Street > > Author > > Website/Blog <http://earthatory.wordpress.com/> > > > -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ "The Human Hacking Field Guide" - http://shlom.in/hhfg Chuck Norris once wrote a 10 million lines C++ program in Microsoft Notepad without having to use the backspace key. And it compiled without errors or warnings, and was 100% bug‐free. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list Want to unsubscribe? Use this link: http://pidgin.im/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/support
