Simple way to STOP VIRUSES PERMANENTLY FOREVER

MOST PEOPLE IN THIS FORUM see an email with a PIF or EXE or even a JPG (we check for long extensions that finally end with .exe) and we either trash them or IF they are from someone we trust and IF we know they were sending them THEN we open them. If both of those conditions are NOT true, I dust em off without hesitation: after all, that JPG or EXE is still alive and well out there somewhere so if I absolutely am supposed to get it, they can tell me it is coming and I can figure out if I trust that person or not.


But while MANY (not most) users follow similar policies, enough of them don't. They see a PAYPAL WANTS YOU TO UPDATE YOUR INFORMATION message and click and OOOOPS-infection ho!


Scanners are great but as these germs are showing, they react TOO LATE when new strains hit the pipe. That is the hackers strength: new strains enter the entire http system and go man go and even if detected within 5-8 hours, infection rates of 1.5 million appear to be rather modest... hackers will be trying to brek that record. That is their goal right?


So, WHAT IF all emails with attachments were sent to a bin that had a giant warning on it- a RED page users saw before going in there. You could disable the message by reading some page about attachments and clicking I UNDERSTAND and thus newbie users were 'educated' and still, ALL emails with attachments were sent to that mail bin instead of a general inbox. It means the only way to get infected would be through html based emails (they could be segregated as well which would help slow down spammers) and through LINKS that caused a download/open cycle and alas, THEY could be segregated as well leaving inboxes free with only text based messages.

A pain? Yes I suppose but if MS was really interested in our PC and mental health, Outlook could be reconfigured to seperate emails with html code or attachments to xinbox and hinbox and free up inbox for relatively safe emails.

I have gone to clients and set up filters to catch and segregate a lot of this stuff but most users don't know how to set up filters and find they are a pain. Well, they whine about spam, they whine about exe's that infect their computers and we whine about terrorists and we whine about the new 'patriot act'. The old saying Cops are only there when you don't need them holds true for detecting viruses too I guess but if ISP's and Mail Servers had a segregation policy and a RED/EDU page the number of newbie users who downloaded viruses would probably drop to the point that the same 5-8 hour period it currently takes for new virus definitions to propogate would reduce that 1.5 million figure significantly...

My personal POP mail filter (a perl thingy) ignores html messages (sends them to the trash) and leaves attachments on the server for me to manually review. The only time I was infected was when I ran without a firewall and some charming hack put popups on my PC... another cute trick that I am sure IE will eventually wipe out.

 

 

 

 

Top