[Rhodes22-list] Virus???

Rik Sandberg sanderico at earthlink.net
Wed Apr 14 10:25:44 EDT 2004


Thanks Mark,

I'll look into those links, although if they're written in technospeak, 
they my just fly right over my head :-)

Funny, my default email address is through earthlink, and I get hardly any 
spam at all through it. And, it's not like I am all that careful about 
where I surf. I buy quite a bit of stuff on line, so I'm sure my address is 
out there in plenty of places. Now Sandy, on the other hand, had a hotmail 
address that was so choked with spam that it was virtually unusable. I 
finally convinced her to drop the darn thing, 'cause it was more trouble 
than it was worth.

Rik


At 08:52 AM 4/14/2004, you wrote:
>Rik,
>
>Linux rocks! I've been working w/ it off-and-on since kernel 0.82. The
>overwhelming majority of virii, Trojans, and worms are directed at Microsoft
>products. That combined with the fact that Microsoft's default security
>settings have historically been a joke makes for bad news for Windows users
>and good news for you. To be fair, however, MS does seem to be paying more
>attention to security lately w/ various federal agencies beginning to raise
>Cain (raze cane <g>?) about it.
>
>R.e. spam - your ISP probably has a lot to do with it. That and avoiding
>posting your email address on web sites, etc. I run my own email server at
>home and get very little spam from there. I also have an account w/
>Earthlink - I get tons of spam at that email address. I am listed as owner
>or technical contact on many domains - the spammers "harvest" email
>addresses from wherever they can find them, including DNS records. I get
>tons of spam at work. Seems like I read recently that about 60% of all email
>is spam these days.
>
>As an aside, I recently received an offer to buy over 300 million email
>addresses that were supposedly harvested from eBay - probably not true, but
>it could be - I don't have the time to check out every piece of spam that
>our spam filter catches. I took a quick look at this one, though - enough to
>see that the email originated from a domain run by a guy with an American
>sounding name in California, but owned by someone with a very Russian
>sounding name in Belarus.
>
>And it's way more than just spam or email virii you have to be concerned
>with. What if Pay Pal or eBay had a customer info security leak? Personal
>information stored online is a big, big concern. Seems like almost every day
>some bank or insurance firm (or one of their outsourcing companies) has a
>security breach or a laptop or drives or backup tapes stolen that contain
>thousands or hundreds of thousands of customer records including SS numbers
>and account numbers.
>
>If you're interested, an excellent resource for this sort of news is the
>SANS Privacy Bits newsletter - it comes out weekly and contains
>privacy-related news from sources world-wide -
>http://www.sans.org/newsletters/privacybits/. Sometimes the editorial
>content is a bit much, but the collection hard news is excellent.
>
>The same can be said for my other two favorite resources for security
>issues, also from SANS -
>
>NewsBites http://www.sans.org/newsletters/newsbites/ and
>
>@Risk http://www.sans.org/newsletters/newsbites/
>
>They can be a bit technical, but they'll certainly give you a realistic,
>non-alarmist view of what's happening out there in Internet security land.
>It can be a pretty scary place....
>
>Mark
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org
>[mailto:rhodes22-list-bounces at rhodes22.org]On Behalf Of Rik Sandberg
>Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 9:38 AM
>To: The Rhodes 22 mail list
>Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] Virus???
>
>
>Thanks Julie and Michael,
>
>I really don't worry too much about it for myself. I generally run K-Mail
>and
>Firefox in Xandros(linux) for most of my online stuff anymore. These don't
>seem as vunerable to these attacks, from what I have seen. I do wonder
>though, if it is possible for one of these to get into my email and spread
>this stuff around without me knowing it. Even though it probably can't do
>much to hurt my computer, I do worry that I may inadvertently be spreading
>stuff that would do harm to folks still using MS stuff.
>
>I do have a firewall (2 actually hardware and softwear) and run f-protect.
>In
>almost a year of using Xandros(linux) I have yet to have found any kind of
>virus in it, other than a script I put in myself, to make sure the virus
>checker was working.
>
>Those of you who are tired of all this crap, might consider giving Xandros a
>try. It's pretty "windows like" as far as using it goes. For me, the
>iinstall
>was very simple and quick. There are only a couple of things I need to turn
>on MS for at all, anymore. Though it is not free, @ $89 IIRC, for what you
>get, compared to MS prices, it is incedibly cheap.
>
>Next question: How is it that some talk about getting 50 or a 100 spam
>messages a day, and I get hardly any???? Am I just that special? :-) :-) Or
>is this something to do with the difference in ISPs, maybe??? I haven't
>changed my email address in several years.
>
>Rik
>
>
>On Wed, Apr 14 2004 07:37 am, Michael Meltzer wrote:
> > that is correct sir :-)
> >
> > ever since "I love you", the writew try to "pick" subject and content that
> > will tick you into clicking, part of the problem is ms it self, long ago
> > they should have stopped premitting this type of attachment to be
> > clickable, the problem is the setting stops all attachments so on one sets
> > it.
> >
> > MJM
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Rik Sandberg" <sanderico at earthlink.net>
> > To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list" <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> > Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 2:34 AM
> > Subject: [Rhodes22-list] Virus???
> >
> > > Michael,
> > >
> > > Lately, I've been getting a ton of what appear to be undeliverable
> > > returned e-mails.......that I didn't send and don't recognize the
>address
> > > on. They have some kind of attachment, which of course I haven't opened.
> > > Is this the newest scam to get us ignorant old farts to open a virus
> > > attachment???
> > >
> > > Keep your eyes open guys. Seems there's a new trick every day.
> > >
> > > Rik
> > >
> > > __________________________________________________
> > > Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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>
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