Email Virus Alert(s)

Use Linux

I open any mail without thinking.  Virus? What is so called?

Viruses are not written basically to steal money,as if windows users are all millionaires or something. Most windows users are using pirated copies.Correct me if am wrong? Viruses are written just to create havoc. The reason they cannot work so well in Linux is that by design, Linux systems are security conscious. You can't do anything that will affect the running of the system without signing in as SU(super user) or root.

Windows we all know is not like that. That is how come, macros can be written to take advantage of Activex lapses using IE and Outllok. Look at the "I love you" virus. Apart from this is number. Since you guys are the most available, why would I target a less than 10% OS users of Mac OS , BSD, Linux when I have a chance of making a name by infecting the 90% who use windoze.

Accepted.  I didn't think that statement through before publishing it.

@timba, i have a policy of not allowing the downloading of the following file (exe, dll, zip, mp3, iso etc) to just anyone, apart from the fact about viruses the are bandwidth hog. If they want to download them they notify me and i allow them to do that once they are through i put on the lock again.

I sounds crazy to be formating system everyday. Viruses can wreck havoc on your network if you are not careful. I hope you also know that these viruses can turn your pcs into spambox.

So it's just better to protect yourself than stressing yourself.   

@joftech, if it's your organizational policy to disallow downloads with those extensions, it's okay but have you considered what could happen if someone downloads a file with a .txt extension but the Content-Type is that of VBScript or something like that - it would provide the same effect (depending on the browser) as downloading a .vbs file. May be you should consider blocking by content type instead of by file extension.

Secondly, from experience, I've found out that if you have Windows^TM (since the OS seems to be the one giving the most problems) installed on your client systems, having them automatically download updates (which are executables) and installing them is a good thing - trust me it would save you a lot of headache especially when there's a worm epidemic.

On the network I administer, we use a proxy cache that throttles the bandwidth allocated to a request when the file size of the download is really large. That way, you could choose to download an ISO and it would not become a bandwidth hog for the rest of the Internet users.

Third, a well configured firewall would stop the activities of a number of worms even if they do infect any of your systems. I once had a problem with a mass-mailing worm and I was able to stop the activity of the worm sending itself as a mail attachment by blocking access to the SMTP. The only problem I had with the worm was that it kept trying to resolve MX records for a number of mail destinations - I'm still looking for ways of blocking MX lookup requests from the DNS server (since we don't need it). Do you know how?

BIND 9