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The Love Letter virus was one of the most successful email viruses because many people desperately want a love letter. Since it sends itself to people in the victim’s Outlook or Outlook Express address book, it looks like it could be for real. Some versions of the Melissa attachment held a list of user names and passwords that would supposedly let the victim into pay to view porn sites. Thanks to the click of death, Melissa briefly shut down the US Air Force email system – and a lot of corporate email systems, too. One solution is to phone the person who sends an attachment. "Hey, Joe, did you really send me a love letter and porn site passwords?" If you can’t resist clicking, here’s what to do instead. In Windows first open Notepad (or any non-Microsoft word processing program) and use it to open the suspect file. You can reach Notepad from Start à Programs à Accessories. In Eudora it is easy to find attachments. Look in the Eudora folder for the "attach" directory. Outlook and Outlook Express attachments are in: C:/Documents and Settings/(user name)/Local Settings/ This can sometimes be confusing. An attachment consisting of a web page may be in this location under the subdirectory "Temporary Internet files" mixed in with material from recent web browsing sessions. When in doubt, you can use the search function under Explorer to find the attachment you want to view. Don’t open web page attachments unless you have configured your browser to not run scripts of any sort (see below for details. The danger of using any Microsoft Office program to open attached files, including database and spreadsheet files, is because of their macro capabilities. Macro malware often infests Office files. What if your antivirus program misses a malicious macro? To be safe, if you must open an attached file in an Office program, set it to warn you before running macros. To turn on macro checking, in each Office application, click Tools --> Options --> General. Check the Macro virus protection box. This feature won’t tell you whether a macro hides a virus. It will only give you the choice of disabling macros. Also – watch out. A few years ago a virus turned off the macro protection feature in Office 97. With Office 2000 and XP you can use certificates to guarantee that that Office files are free of macro viruses. Do you want to gamble that viruses won’t find a way to disable this? One solution is to run Open Office instead. There are versions for Windows, Linux (including PPC Linux, which runs on Apple and other Power PC hardware) and other Unix type operating systems. It’s free from http://www.openoffice.org/. Open Office has an option to run Java, the scripting language so beloved of virus writers. To be safe, install it without Java support. To do this, choose custom installation. In the Java Setup Screen, click "Java and JavaScript are not supported." Another option is Star Office, which is closely related to Open Office. There are versions for all versions of Windows, for Linux and Solaris operating systems. It’s available from computer giant Sun at http://www.sun.com/software/. The downloaded version is free. For a small fee you can also get it on CD with manuals. File Sharing If you have a Windows computer, make sure you aren’t sharing files unless you absolutely need to do so. If you can ship files from one Windows computer to another using shares, a hacker might figure out how to ship your files to his computer. File sharing uses NetBIOS. Even if you have never heard of NetBIOS, your Windows computer might be running it. To find out, in Windows 95, 98, and ME click Start à Control Panelà Network. Under the Configuration tab, scroll down to your Internet connection. This will be under Dial-up Adapter and/or Ethernet Adapter. Highlight the adapter you want to check, then click File and Print Sharing. If it is checked, and you don’t need to let other computers access your files or print annoying things on your printer, uncheck it. |
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