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Strategies & Market Trends : TA-HARD & SOFTWARE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Liam Kingsmill who wrote (147)	1/21/1998 10:05:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Respond to of 163

Excellent prose Liam, glaed to hear things are working out well for you. Avoiding uninstallers and not trying to clean to much are good tips. An even better one is to only load what you need and when you get something stable back it up and don't change it very much and concentrate on using it...... Netscape can and will cache plenty of stuff. IE too.... Someone at IE needs to fix there problems with favorites. My favorites in any version of IE are almost 300 Megs for a file that is 480K in Netscape. What a pathetic waste of space..... Sean

To: Liam Kingsmill who wrote (147)	1/21/1998 10:07:00 AM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 163

All, something from email the other day thats worth repeating..... My original statement remains correct. Let me explain in more detail why. Fundamental truth: For a virus or any program to act malicously toward your system it must execute instructions on the host computer. Reading an email can not cause this to happen because it is simlpy displaying (NOT executing information) sent you by another user. Attacks such broadcast ping (smurf) are not considered virsues because of this fact. Instead they are classfied as attacks which include denial or service or fatal (crash the host).If the attack has a way to spread itself without executing code by taking advantage of security loops (aka. internet worm) it is typically classfied as a worm. There is only one widely worm which took advantage of the lack of security to flood a mailserver and his neighbors casuing them to overflow and crash. Tecnically someone could right a virus that would attack a specific mail reader AOL by exposing a hole in its features. This has never been documented to my knowledge. It would be impossible to write a virus that could broadly attack email readers. By now your saying but I caught a virus from ansy's email. Let me explain.... You did not catch a virus from an email but from an attached file. Either an .exe file or a MS office document. With an .exe file you would have to click on it and launch for the virus to do any damage. Saving it as a file on your HD or viewing it(except with office) will not infect your system. A MS Office file that contains a virus is called a macro virus. Microsoft in the infite wisdom decide to create a very robust macro system with office where macros can be fasioned through the GUI or written in VB, VB Script, C++ etc. These macro's can become part of an actual word document. They contain native X86 code that obviously can do a great deal of damage to a computer. For convience and flexibility sake they added a feature thatcan auto-run a macro upon invocation of a document never think that someone could/would write a "macro virus". Guess what. They did and macro viruses are the fastest growing segment of viruses today. Why? because they are deceving. John doe says how can I get virus from reading word document. Answer of course is that the doc contains both text and macros which are autorun and can infect your computer. Before MS Office this parasigm has never existed in computing to my knowledge. So as you can now see you did not get a virus from reading email but from launching an attached exexutable or launching an office document containing a macro virus. Furthermore, you cannot get a virus by putting a virus infected disk in your machine and doing a dir on it. Or viewing a file in notepad or most other viewers except office. You must execute a program that is infected or boot the floppy (boot sector virus) to activate the virus and potentially cause damage. OK, now we know how viruses can cannot infect us so how do we prevent them. 1. Run Antivirus Software on your PC. 2. udpate your virus databases frequently and consitently (some have tools to help do this now) 3. Configure your viruscan to autoscan upon opening all files (convient, can slow system cosniderably). 4. Don't launch and executable or office doc without first checking for virus manually. There are a couple new programs which add downloading features comapared to native netscape or ie and have winzip and auto viruscanning features in them. (Download to a secure sandbox). 5. Be very careful of files with multiple levels on compression (zip in a zip) or (arj in zip) etc. scanners won't recurse the hierarchy.) Scan the results after unompression before running setup if possible. 6. Scan all offce docs. 7. Enable the security features in office which can disable macros or at least warn of the presence of macros or active content in an office doc prior to executing them. Tons of virus info can be found at the IETF, Symantec, McAffe, and Dr. Solomns web pages. and in the manuals that comes with most virus software. Text Files, Gif's, Jpeg's and no other know formats except office docs have this feature so feel safe to view charts etc. Active-X Applets have this same nast capability but can be downloaded with consent from the web with your consent. Java never executes native code on the host and its whole env is limited to a virutal sandbox so that desctructive programs are implicetly allowed. Active-x support has been fading. Most likely because of this. Even MS is admitting its mistake here. more later... Sean W. Smith ASIC Design & Verification sesmith@cisco.com Cisco Systems, RTP, NC sean_smith@mindspring.com #include <std.disclaim> mindspring.com for PGP key and more information netmediasolutions.com annual ski Trip photos > -----Original Message----- > From: Brookemail [mailto:Brookemail@aol.com] > Sent: Monday, January 19, 1998 2:06 PM > To: sean_smith@mindspring.com > Subject: Re: Viruses and e-mail > > > Sean: I respect you for your knowledge about computers -- you know more than > anyone else I know -- but I will venture to say that you're wrong about > getting viruses from e-mail. I'm coming down with Andy's flu, after reading > his note about his fever and cough, and we all know that he caught it from > Bill Sandusky, after reading his e-mail. So on this one matter, it seems, > you're mistaken. Perhaps, though, I misunderstood what you said. You may have > meant that computers can't catch viruses from e-mail. But even that isn't > quite right -- my laptop may have caught the bug from Andy, too. The screen > was freezing occasionally, and it was coughing a bit at start-up. > > Don't be concerned about reading this note -- I was very careful about not > coughing while writing it. > > Brooke >