Email users are finally getting smarter to help crush the bad guys on the Internet email front. If an email client receives a unknown email from a source they don’t recognize the person running the email client doesn’t click the link / attachment anymore. Boy what a difference and it only took 10 years of telling the general population of not to click links or attachments they had now clue who the sender was.
Alert! – Alert! – Alert!
If you view emails with HTML enabled then disable auto-preview in your email client. It doesn’t matter if it’s a web view (like outlook.com) or a local email client (like thunderbird). In HTML view live scripts run in the background (like they should with HTML5) but the bad guys have figured out how to run scripts automatically to open questionable web links or virus attachments to try and corrupt your computer, all by just viewing the email and not clicking anything in the email…. Nice Right?
Two ways of fixing this:
- disable HTML viewing of emails (pros: no more problems with scripts running out of control, cons: certain email will look distorted due to formatting that is needed by HTML)
- disable Email Auto View (pros: suspected emails can no longer infected your system and be safely deleted while viewing your safe emails in all their glory, cons: if opened they will try to infect your system still)
Alert! – Alert! – Alert!
Email is not the only target anymore, Twitter and Facebook and other social networks are now being targeted. This is beyond the scope of this article but more can be found here: Security Now – 614
This problem has got so out of hand (like 10+ years) there are no longer any individuals writing viruses, they are using bot nets (already written software that is freely available to the idiots out there) to run on the Internet in self mode (no user interaction required). Once a computer / network is infected it try’s to self propagate itself to reinject as many systems as it can, the only way we can stop this is stop allowing them to infect our / your systems and identity the infected system to clean them of any infections.
