Tim Partridge wrote: > I was somewhat surprised to see the word Unicode on page 8 of the Metro > newspaper (London, UK) today (January 28, 2004). > > Unfortunately it was in the middle of an article about Mydoom, where it says > "The message may read 'The message contains Unicode characters and has been > sent as a binary attachment.'" This was the only one of the possible > messages they quoted, presumably because it was the most distinctive.
A lot of the press (and online accounts) picked up this message and mentioned it in their account of the MyDoom virus, as this was the more unique and interesting of the alternatives. If you were a journalist, would you pick this one instead: "The message cannot be represented in 7-bit ASCII encoding and has been sent as a binary attachment." > > The name Unicode is now in mailboxes around the world - is this a good or > bad thing? The Unicode officers were notified of this within hours of the outbreak of the worm, and are monitoring the publicity. So far, it doesn't appear that anybody has warped this into some kind of unwarranted slam on Unicode security problems or some other bogus interpretation. My interpretation is that Unicode has now become ubiquitous enough on systems and has enough issues in email to be viewed as a valid excuse for a social engineering approach to getting people to execute dangerous attachments. --Ken
