Sircam

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Very good advice Seth. I always recommend manually running a good 
commercial anti-virus scanner on it also even if I get it from a trusted 
source. I once received a spread sheet that contained a virus from my 
secretary. Always be wary of attachments even from trusted people. One 
of the tricks used by SirCam and others is that they like to masquerade 
as text or other non-executable files with file names like:
FOO.TXT.exe or FOO.TXT.pif (on Windows). Windows systems do not 
display the file extensions by default so a curious recipient will see the 
text file and open it. (Maybe he deserves what he gets :-). 
But remember, no system is immune to worms and viruses, not 
Windows, not commercial Unixes, not Linux. We're just not prime 
targets right now.  

On 7 Aug 2001, at 14:38, Seth Gordon wrote:

> 
>      - NEVER open a file of any of these types which you have received
> in
>        e-mail, unless you are expecting it and know exactly what's in it
> 
>        before hand (or verified it with the sender before opening, at
> least).
> 
> I have this image of a virus that lies dormant on a system until the
> user emails an executable attachment to someone else ... at which
> point the virus will intervene and substitute itself for the
> attachment.

Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Associate Director
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org
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