Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Re: Mail server report - another desktop email trojan.

The guys who program viruses and trojans and all other sorts of malware and adware are very clever. Don't get me wrong, I don;t condone what they do and actually despise it. It's a thorn in my side as I try to about my job, every now and then I'll get someone who has just polluted their computer system with one of the adware type of programs that either creates pop-ups gallery or has slowed down their desktop so bad they could barely do anything productive.
Some of the worst one out there make the computer almost useless.

These types just don't make sense to me. If they have the talent or skill to put together software that could download to systems automatically and open browsers and go to web pages they want the unsuspecting computer users to go to, why make a computer useless with junk. Make money with this talent. Why annoy people?

The latest incanation I've seen was just today. It's not actually a new one but a variation of the same old tired method of trying to infect desktops all around the world. It's the simple email a zip attachment that contains a computer virus routine. What makes this and other like it interesting is that the subject and body of the messages are made to look like they are really legitimate. This one had a subject that read:

Re: Mail server report

Well, this matches the usual bland email subject found in most server based or monitoring type applications and could fool many users. The body could also get people ot believe that it's a legitimate email. It mentioned things about risk and your computer should be updated and the attachment had a name that was similar to a Microsoft Knowledgebase file name. All of these coupled together has probably got a lot of people running the attachment thinking it's going to help them.

I believe there should be some real penalties for people who are caught doing these things. There must be some liability for the actions they take. They hurt people by spreading these types of programs around.

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