[Rhodes22-list] Virus???

[Mark Kaynor]

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
>
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help? www.rhodes22.org/list

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