At 03:45 PM 3/2/2004 -0800, Tom Holub wrote:
>I would vote for completely dropping the messages. People are confused
>enough about this whole virus problem, and there's very little legitimate
>reason to send .zip attachments.
At 17:50 -0800 2004-03-02, John Wuorenmaa replied:
>We should just do away with attachments altogether with this logic.
>That way, no one would have to make a decision whether to open an
>attachment or not. Shielding a user's bad habits from this
>particular exploit only gives them a false sense of security in the
>future. ... What better way to teach the masses of haphazard
>attachment clickers than by the nasty result of their actions?
It is not only the users who open infected attachments who may
experience negative consequences from having done so. A number of
worms - successfully or otherwise - attempt to make infected
computers subject to remote control, which could have potentially
far-reaching consequences.
The prospect of having computers on the campus network turned into
'zombies,' by mass mailing worms that we currently can't detect at
the email gateway, isn't highly appealing ...
Also to be clear, this is a temporary and hopefully short-lived
measure that CalMail's sysadmins -- and now apparently Socrates' as
well -- are undertaking. This measure should no longer be necessary
when the latest worm variants, which use password-protected ZIP file
attachments, can be detected by scanning on those systems.
Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group
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Received on Tue Mar 2 18:36:56 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Mar 02 2004 - 18:36:57 PST