Virus check...

"Colin Wilson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.motzarella.org...

Given that there are different bugs in different versions of Java, and even when there aren't "bugs" that can be proven as such there are incompatibilities, you sometimes need different versions of Java in order to be able to run different applications.

If you're *very* unlucky this means each machine needs several versions of Java, and each user needs to be adept at spotting when an application is trying to run with the wrong version and fixing it. More common is the situation that you find a version of Java that works for most of your users most of the time ... but it's quite likely not the latest one, given the application development and upgrade cycle times, hence people using "an old version of Java" for extremely good reasons is not going to be uncommon.

Although I don't use java heavily, I don't recall a single application written using the official (non-microsoft-bastardised-pseudo-java) version not working with the latest release :-}

Sadly, our place is keen to use activex and bastardised-non-java-java for almost everything from intranet to bespoke applications :-/

...and yes, now we find ourselves in the same situation where we need to have java switchers in place to run what I warned them about years ago.

Speak of the devil, and he comes and cr*ps on your shoulder ...

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Note:

eMail purports to be from Irish Gaming Board, but comes from optonline.net domain, which is just another ISP, and I should reply to hotmail domain, which one of the most easily abused online email systems, in that they make only minimal, if any, provenance checks.

Split infinitive, wouldn't mean anything the other side of the pond, but bad English this side, capital Y in middle of sentence, Your's instead of yours.

Mail contains attachment the purpose of which is not mentioned in text.

So virus spam, I th> Trouble is, they are designed to look like something else.

Had the same, it's due to your computer being infected by a virus BEFORE the email.

Assuming your replies, this is a troll, but,

Boot a live CD and scan.

Ask for more help on this, or better yet, Google and learn a s*it-load.

This idiot isn't killfiled here.

Didn't you bother to see I was posting on a Mac, and it couldn't e infected with a windws virus?

"Colin Wilson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@news.motzarella.org...

How are they doing that? M$ dumped their java like language years ago. You can't download the engine or any fixes from M$. You can't get a license to run their engine so its probably illegal if you are. All the existing licenses were revoked IIRC.

With the virus that was in the first batch of emails you'd have known if you ran the program in the zip file as the machine would have immediately rebooted. It's not clear if the later ones work in exactly the same way, but I suspect it's similar.

Spybot S&D is quite good at detecting and removing things, and you probably need something like it to remove actual infections rather than just relying on your usual AV software, which is better for detection and prevention.

suggested by the University's Technical User Support team, but that may just be because it's not free. Sorry I can't help.

I've seen it happen a few times...

I can't help thinking something like VMWare would help with situations like this, though - with disk space and memory being as cheap as it is, it's easy to keep a few virtual images around with different configurations and trivial to roll things back to a 'known-good' snapshot. Run any untrusted apps under the virtual image, but save user data somewhere under the host OS.

cheers

Jules

It seems acceptable to me though, providing such things aren't silently binned but can be retrieved from the ISP on a case-by-case basis (in a similar way I tend to scan my junk mail folder a couple of times a week before clearing it out - every once in a while there's something legitimate in there)

cheers

Jules

It's possible to set things up so that legitimate messages sent from standards-compliant sites never disappear silently even when they trigger the anti-virus filter, and without causing any collateral spam or backscatter.

Tony.

Who knows - sadly, I could care less right now, we've just been informed they're rolling out another image to all machines, which if it's anything like the last one they did, it'll kill all USB functionality (not a lot of use when you have users who need to get pictures off digital cameras regularly).

AFAIK I was the only one thinking straight and got a card reader a few years ago - they were still trying to force us to use smartmedia via one of the Sandisk Flashpath floppy device adaptors...

Hell, if it's anything like my existing install, it'll take 25-30 minutes to boot minimum (it's not a particularly slow machine either)

Been there, suggested that.

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:38:56 +0100, Tim Ward passed an empty day by writing:

It's your system and you are free as a 'grown up' to take you own approach. It is one thing to let a virus pass on to a customer, it is another for that customer to take responsibility for his or her actions on opening it.

Well, you are of course free to do as you both please, and have obviously considered whether the risk is acceptable to you.

I decided I was happy to run virus scanners on the mail server and on the Windows PCs to give more defence in depth, so that's fine with me.

Everyone aware of their own risks, and happy.

Expect something to go wrong with the universe shortly.....

Well, I would assume that any ISP-run scheme has a complete opt-out. It's just that the OS vendors don't seem to be doing anything much to make their products more secure, the end users seem to be, on the whole, utterly clueless, and there are just so many new virus variations per day that it's hard for them to keep up anyway.

I just think that putting the technology in at the ISPs might be the only route left - and that it might take quite a bit of effort initially, but if every ISP were doing it the problem would eventually go away anyway as there's be no incentive to write viruses (or spam) in the first place.

Not running Windows helps me a lot with the defence side of course, but what really annoys me is that someone out there feels the need to send me this crap in the first place - hence screening it further upstream would seem like a nice idea...

Except that by and large, they aren't aware... :(

cheers

J.

Which is probably why my Bank when ape-sh*t yesterday and called me to cancel my VISA card *even* due to the fact there had been no funny transactions recorded on it. Not convienient for me as I'm travelling soon :-(

Nice one. I have a very good friend who works for a very well known anti- virus company. The support staff have a document to follow if a virus is sent in that has not been identified. Would you believe it reads;

"First of all confirm the file is a virus."

How do you think they have been doing this? Why, by opening them and running them on their windows desktops and looking to see if the AV (which never caught it in the first place, hence why the customer has submitted it) detects it.

You could not make this up if you tried.