Virus check...

[The Natural Philosopher]

sure, but all will allow you to investigate a link before going there in some way as far as I know.

[Fevric J Glandules]

We're talking about attachments, not hyperlinks.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Well I was initially, but then it was claimed that these no longer exist, and that the real danger was hyperlinks..

And in act my original query wasn't so much that I had recieved such, but har recieved it with an enormous amount of personal information that

*very* few online sites actually know. Namely my certificated christian name that I haven't used for years, no one knows of, and only is EVER used by me on legal documents and occasionally my bank details. Its not even printed on my credit card or cheques.

Which suggested a major leak somewhere in some pretty trusted organisation.

[dennis]

They probably have statistics for the most attacked, and the most compromised but not the most vulnerable as that is unknown.

[dennis]

Hotmail is good, especially if you signed up early enough to get a sensible name and free access from outlook.

[Tim Ward]

Just viruses. I get 0 viruses coming through, and being a software engineer send and receive executables from time to time and don't recall ever losing any. (At my end, that is - people at the other end with poorly configured Outlook is another matter.)

[Eleanor Blair]

Which ISP is this? Do you know how they're identifying these viruses?

I'm just surprised that you so strongly suggest that this is an easily solved problem which all good ISPs should have got licked, rather than simply that none have got through to you.

[Tim Ward]

34sp

Nope. And if I did know I wouldn't publish details somewhere virus writers could read them.

[Fevric J Glandules]

Hmmm... where was the original post? Seems to have crept into cam.misc mid-thread.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh, it's about a month or two old. For some reason some prat reopened it. Cork-soaker IIRC.

The history is that I got sent a virus as zip file attachment, purporting to be from Orange.

I checked it, found it was a virus, so nothing new there,.

However the disturbing part of it was how mch very restricted information they had about me. Almost enough to convince me it might not have been a virus.

Then thread drift happened with peole telling me I already had a virus, and should boot from a Live CD. which is linux terminology: I run a Mac, or reinstall windows, which isn't anymore relevant,

Then others climbed in claiming that email attachments never contained viruses anymore, and that the real danger was web sites with active code etc etc.

In short the usual thread drift.

Some ISP's do remove known virus laden emails. Some don't. Its a bit of a pain if they do, if you want to send one to a virus checking site.

A more interesting drift was the relative vulnerability of the main platforms..windows, MAC Linux etc.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh tush.

There are a zillion programs out there that can scan an email, and unzip any zipped bits, and look for known 'signatures' that identify a certain bit pattern as being characteristic of a known virus.

They are called 'virus checkers;' and they contain a downloaded library of such signatures.

And applying them to a mail stream at an ISP is no different to having them installed on your desktop. They just take a huge amount of processing power.

Its nothing new. And nothing the virus writers dont know already.