OT Bills of Lading emails

[Nightjar]

Is anybody else getting these? I get 2-3 a week, all claiming that the .htm attachment is a bill of lading that I need to open, which obviously I don't.

Colin Bignell

[Brian Gaff]

Oh yes, all sorts of things like thither, Most end up in the spam bin and I only see them when I bother to go and look. Brian

[Tim Streater]

For about the last week I've been getting .zip files (about 15 a day) that the email claims is a fax, voice mail, invoice, etc etc. The one or two I've clicked on all expand to .exe files so no problem there. There's also a few trying to boost a penny stock or whatever it is, which all have a bunch of junk text at the end - they obviously don't know that such text has no impact on a Bayesian spam filter.

[Huge]

I've had a huge spike in emails with virus laden attachments in the last

24 hours. I usually get 1 or 2 a week, I must have had 15 in the last 24 hours.

My initial thought was that it was social engineering on the back of Heartbleed, but I can't see how.

[Johny B Good]

That could be a "Gold Rush" attack aimed at all those winXP boxes that will no longer be recieving any more security patch updates from Microsoft.

If you're planning on using winXP, you just need to be a damn sight more careful over _any_ attachments and make sure your AV is up to date and avoid overloading your AV solution's limited abilities to protect the system.

The more canny will have partitioned their hard drive so the OS alone lives on the boot drive to make regular partition imaging less painless (and restore operations that little bit slicker) because it's best not to assume that whatever AV / security packages you're using will prevent a successful malware attack.

The System Restore built into all versions of windows since XP is too complex and fragile to be used to back the system out of an 'infected state'. A seperate rescue boot CD or pen drive with backup images is the only viable solution to fixing a 'rooted' system. The use of AV is merely to reduce the frequency of image restore operations to an acceptly low level.

[Brian Gaff]

Who knows, I'm also getting bit fed up with these chinese companies selling everything from boat hulls to paper clips. Why would I be interested in this mornings bunch of, Genuine plastic moulding tooling, or Concrete planters from China?

I was wondering what fake plastic moulding tooling looked like but I suspect the real meaning got lost in translation. Brian

[Brian Gaff]

Well I don't know about that, as long as one does not open dodgy emails or visit dodgy sites I've never had an issue with xp. I notice that I'm going to get malicious software removal tool updates till next July,not this but next, as well.

I have often run various versions of early windows with no protection at all for months without anything actually getting in. In a way that is a bit worrying!

Brian