Odp: Re:bugbear virus was [sdiy] new CD..

[Seb Francis]

"Scott Evans, Gen Mgr" wrote:

> Seb Francis wrote:
> >
> > Outlook can show this as "hello.gif" which looks quite harmless!
> >
>
> Not for long, perhaps. It was on the Symantec page where I read that
> someone has successfully delivered a worm in a .jpg file. This
> particular virus had no malicious code and another component must have
> been loaded to an unsuspecting system for it to work, but this should be
> a concern and virus software must be kept up to date. See the story here
> below.
>
> http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.perrun.html
>

Although it says you must already have been infected by (part of) the virus for infected .jpg files to be executed.  Any file can carry virus code, but only files which get "executed" can actually do anything.  The initial infection can only come from files which windows itself executes (i.e. the list of file extensions in my previous mail).

An up to date virus checker is of course a good thing, but really you can make yourself pretty safe just by not opening these types of files unless you know they come from a reputable origin.  Outlook is also bad news since it can (because of software/design flaws) execute harmful stuff in emails even without the user explicitly choosing to do it.

Anyway, getting way OT now ;)

Seb