Let’s say that one day, you receive a package in the post. It has a strange return address you’ve never corresponded with. Inside, there is a small bottle of mysterious liquid with a note attached that simply reads: “Drink me”.
Would you just shrug your shoulders, open the bottle, and guzzle down its contents?
Hell no!
Then why oh why, when people encounter mysterious emails beckoning them to run attachments of executables, they just dumbly click on?
For the average user, there is absolutely no reason to send or receive executable programs or scripts (anything with an EXE, BAT, COM, PIF, VBS, etc. extension) through email.
Executables can be viruses. Especially ones where you cannot guarantee their origins. So use some sense.
Most victims of email based virii never even see the file extensions (EXE, BAT, COM, OIF, VBS) since Windows have default settings to NOT show file extension.
And mostly these users even don’t know you can change the settings, nor how to change it.
So all these users (victims) will see is “Report.doc” or “Naked.jpg” with the well known icons never suspecting that the file names are in reality
“Report.doc .pif” or
“Naked.jpg .exe”, etc.
One may hope that users should have learned about the (hidden) dangers but unfortunately, but it would help if Windows (Outlook) would be less secretive about file extensions, e.i. always show the whole file name including the file extension.
Unfortunately, we cannot expect such a change from a certain company in Redmont in near future.
/GeHo
“*Email addresses are not published publicly on this site.”
Sorry, the above statement on your blog is just a half truth.
I guess a better spider (email harvester) can sniff the email address even though you use a #64; instead of a “@”, etc.
Just have a closer look at the page source:
Gerhard