Guest guest Posted September 7, 2003 Report Share Posted September 7, 2003 Namaste all, Unfortunately, everyone's mailboxes are being bombarded with a lot of virus mails these days. To the best of my knowledge, my computers have no viruses in them and are safely behind a firewall in a private LAN and are very tough to hack. However, it is possible to mass-hack email addresses at Cable companies and ISP's. In any case, it is not even necessary to hack any computers to send mails that appear to be from a particular address. The SMTP protocol used in sending mails is very old and was never designed to curtail viruses and expose impersonations. Unfortunately, it is very easy to impersonate using SMTP. It is very easy to send an email that appears to be from an address that you want. These virus programs can collect email addresses from the web and send mass emails all over the place, that appear to be from those collected addresses. Not only I, but many other members have been victims of this. If anybody's machine was infected by a virus in a mail that appears to be from me, I am sorry but there is not much I can do. Even if an impersonation was done by an individual with malicious intentions, it is tough to crack and act on it. If an impersonation is done by a virus or worm, it is even tougher to do anything about it. As a general practice, never open any attachments unless you are absolutely sure that it is not a virus. Especially, these mails titled "Approved", "Wicked Screensaver" etc are viruses. May Jupiter's light shine on us, Narasimha Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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