In article <JsveZWAOTPD8EAyX@...>, julian_bond@...
(Julian Bond) wrote:

> On the Virus thing. BadTrans is aggressively viral. I'm getting 10-20
> per *day*. I guess I must be in a lot of address books.

You and me both.

> For those of you on MS Win machines and using Outlook or Outlook
> Express:-
> 1) Change to something else. Like Eudora

this is the best advice anyone could give. Outlook express and Outlook
[which actually uses Outlook Express as its online engine] are extremely
prone to attacks of this kind. The programming language that lies beneath
these programs has a great deal of power and can be caused to do some
*very* serious things. But there is an even more pressing reason to get
shot of them. You do not need to open the attachments that W32/BadTrans
carries into your system. Simply clicking and viewing the email itself
will trigger the payload. It has become almost essential now to use an
email program that does not decode attachments automatically. While the
payload is still in the coded form in which it is transmitted it can do
nothing. You can look at the headers that precede the code in a message
and decide to delete it before it can 8ever* do any harm.

I'd strongly suggest that posters look at the email/newsgroup program
Ameol2, which is particularly nice to use, and has this desirable property
that you must decode attachments by hand.

Ed Form