Computer Security Weekly, May 17, 1999


The press has gotten hold of these facts, and a couple of others, and is warning about the possibility of viruses that it is impossible to defend against. If your mail program accepts HTML formatted mail (and many do), and if it "prereads" your mail and starts up helper programs so as to be ready when you get to the message (and only one does, as far as I know) then you can be infected, or trojaned, or whatever.

The kicker is, of course, the that one and only program, as far as I am aware, that can really get you into trouble is, of course, our old friend Outlook, from our old friend Microsoft. And, of course, you have to be using Excel. Microsoft has issued a patch to eliminate the CALL function, but you have to be upgraded to the latest version and service release of Excel for the patch to work properly.

CNN's rather sensationalistic take is here. There is also an alert on Russian New Year issued by Finjan Software Ltd., an Israel-based maker of security software.

mailto:rslade@vcn.bc.ca
mailto:rslade@sprint.ca
mailto:robertslade@usa.net
mailto:p1@canada.com Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses, 0-387-94663-2, (800-SPRINGER)
The copyright of the article Computer Security Weekly, May 17, 1999 in Computer Security is owned by Robert Slade. Permission to republish Computer Security Weekly, May 17, 1999 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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