Melissa and E-mail Attachments
Before the Melissa virus in 1999, it was widely
assumed that your friends, family members and business associates
wouldn’t e-mail you a computer virus -- or at least they
wouldn’t knowingly e-mail you an evil file payload.
However, with Melissa that all changed. Based
on a simple Visual Basic routine, Melissa was the first widely
circulated virus that spread itself by automatically e-mailing a
copy of the virus to everyone in your Microsoft Outlook
Address Book. Thus, it was precisely your closest contacts who got
the virus and resulting infection.
It turned out that Melissa’s weapon was that
it was able to flood, or should I say deluge, Internet
routers and mail servers with spurious messages that effectively
shut down mail servers around the globe.
Unsolicited E-mail Attachments
The moral of the story: No matter who the
sender of the e-mail message is, even if the e-mail attachments are
from someone you know such as a coworker, spouse or boss, if you
aren’t expecting the file attachments, they could be major trouble.
If you think you need to look at the contents
of the e-mail attachments, you always can reply back to the sender,
or if possible contact the sender off line, and request him or her
to resend the information in the body of the e-mail message.
For any messages that arouse your suspicions,
don’t forward the e-mail message. Delete the message immediately,
then empty your Deleted Items folder in your e-mail program, as an
added precaution.
Watch out for messages containing e-mail
attachments from unknown sources, as well as messages originating
from senders with odd return e-mail addresses. Be equally cautious
of messages containing attachments that have SPAM-like subject
lines, or message bodies with extremely poor grammar.
Just as important, you need to impart these
precautions to anyone in your company who uses e-mail. Your
users’ vigilance can be an extremely effective weapon in
preventing expensive virus contamination.
Remember, even if you are expecting the e-mail
attachment, you should manually scan the file attachment before
opening it, using the scan on demand methods discussed earlier in
this chapter.
E-mail Attachments Action Items
Does your company have a written policy on
how to deal with suspicious e-mail messages, especially those
containing file attachments?
How is this policy communicated down to
users and incorporated into e-mail training sessions?
What kind of virus containment training is
in your company's new employee orientation?
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