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RE: [APD] Re: Your details




I understand. I have my scanner set to update every four hours as well
and thus far have been fortunate to just get notifications that someone
attempted to send me a virus rather than getting trashed. Obviously I'm
singing to the choir, but if one has a high speed connection, a firewall
is also good "preventative medicine".

That's not always enough. As of late I have been seeing some new virus/worm that is sending attachements called "joke.exe", and usually the body of the message just contains a smiley and nothing more. Anyone receiving a message like that would be well advised to delete the message AND the attachment. I'm not sure exactly what has been sending out the latest batch, but I see hundreds of them daily passing through our mail server at work (we're an ISP).


I've often found the PayPal, eBay, et al., links give themselves away by
the rather obvious misspellings of grammatical errors, leading one to
consider that many of these are perpetrated by those for whom English is
not a first language.

Many of these "please update your user preferences" messages are identity theft scams. Ebay doesn't need your social security number for their records, and they never ask for it. They also make it well known that they will never ask for credit card info in email, either.


If you look closely at any of these messages, you usually will see that they were sent from a cable modem or DSL user. Chances are Ebay, a multi-BILLION dollar organization, is NOT going to contract home users to send their email for them :-) Their revenues really are amazing...

Anyway, for anyone receiving one of those messages, the trick is to look at the HEADERS of the message (which are not normally shown), and follow the RECEIVED: lines down to the last one. The lowest RECEIVED: header in a legitimate message from a large organization won't be something like 192-128-132-56.ne.cal.comcast.net, for example. If that's what you see, then chances are the message is a forgery.

-Bill


***************************** Waveform Technology UNIX Systems Administrator

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