On Tuesday 03 August 2004 00:56, David Robertson wrote:
In short, it's spam. Delete it or report it, as you see fit. If you decide to report it, http://www.spamcop.net is a good starting place.
This is good advice - but don't fall into the trap of thinking that viruses/trojans only affect Windows. Even if a program won't run on Linux, it can still be a nuisance. Once, for example, I clicked on an
I don't mean to sound like I'm downplaying the risks. I'll blame fatigue on that bit of understatment. As sysadmin for a HSP, I fight that battle every day. Even though I've got my users (and quite a few customers) well trained, it's a constant fight on the Windows side - patches, hotfixes, virus scanner updates, virus signature updates, spyware scans. On the Linux side, it's mostly peaceful, except for the mail and DNS servers. Those get indirectly affected by all that crap I'm fighting off on the Windows side. We handle mail for about 99 percent of our hosting customers, so the mail servers are constantly getting hammered by spew from trojans on zombied Windows machines. I can tell when there's a new virus out, because I can see the load average shoots up as the virus scanner starts chewing through a large payload thanks to the latest version of MyDoom. </rant>
.exe file (I know, I know - stupid, must just have been bored or something) and since SuSE try to make everything easier for you, wine proceeded to try and run the program. The end result was that about 80 files were deposited in EACH of the subdirectories (including hidden) of my home folder. No real harm done, except disk space used up and a lot of time to delete them, but a real pain in the proverbial. I won't do that again!
I've done something similar. Tried running a program under dosemu, once, but forgot to disable access to my home directory. The program installed okay, but crashed when I tried to run it. Unfortunately, as its last dying act, it took out every single dotfile and .regular file in my home directory. Luckily, I had done a backup earlier in the day, so nothing was lost. I still got a chuckle out of the whole incident, though. The program I was trying to run was Microsoft Word 5.1 for DOS. -- Homepage http://scott.exti.net XFce desktop environment http://www.xfce.org Goodies for the XFce desktop http://xfce-goodies.berlios.de GPG public key ID: 811B00AB