Computer viruses and Email

Issue:

I'm worried about people sending me viruses and want to know what I can do to protect myself from dangerous computer viruses sent through email.

Solution:

There are three major types of computer viruses to be aware of that are sent by email: chain letter hoaxes, attachments, and Java scripts in HTML messages.

Chain letter hoaxes are the most common. These are the false virus alert warnings that describe horrible and often impossible consequences that will happen if you open a message with a certain subject and pleading with you to help spread the word to everyone you know. They are nothing more than chain letters and not technically viruses, but are mentioned here because of the exponential spread of these messages that occurs when people willingly forward them on to their entire address book, causing needless email traffic that can slow down servers. Valid virus alerts will come from your system administrator and be posted on sites such as http://www.ciac.org.

Attachments are the easiest way you can get infected. You cannot become infected with a computer virus simply by downloading an attachment. In order to allow an attachment to infect your machine you would need to run the attachment. Recently, the Explorer Worm, the Melissa virus, and Happy99 made the news as viruses of this type (Happy99 changes your winsock.dll and attaches itself to all your outgoing mail or news postings, Melissa sends herself to the first 50 addresses in your Microsoft Outlook address book, and the Explorer Worm sends copies of itself to everyone in an email In mailbox and destroys files with the extensions: .h, .c, .cpp, .asm, .doc, .xls, and .ppt.) Be very careful about launching email attachments, even when they appear to have been sent from a friend (it may be the case that your friend's computer is infected and sent the message to you). Don't launch an attachment if you don't know what it is - ask the person who sent it. Update your antivirus software to get the latest virus definitions so scans of your system will detect the latest known viruses.

Java scripts can do damage when someone sends you an HTML message that has Java code in it. By default, Eudora for Windows has a setting "Allow executables in HTML content" turned off, under Tools: Options: Viewing mail, and this is to protect you from such harm. You can also give yourself added protection by changing the directory where your attachments download to (when you leave it as the default, it makes it easier for malicious people to guess where attachments they sent you were stored, and then they can use Java to force them to launch). You can give yourself even more protection by turning off the Microsoft Viewer under Tools: Options: Viewing mail; however this will also affect the way messages are displayed in Eudora and may reduce the quality for messages that contain more then text, as it does not support as much HTML encoding compared to that of the MS Viewer.

For the most up-to-date and detailed information about viruses, check with the manufacturer's website of your virus checking software.

Keywords: EPWIN, VIRUS, VIRUSES, MYDOOM, SECURITY, SECURTY, W32