Mordac

Exactly. We sent you the file. You decided to reject it, your IT department has made an executive decision on behalf of the company that your company does not want to receive that kind of file. Who are we to question your company policy or devise devious workarounds involving smuggling files into work?

You say

"rename the file to .exe to see the new nude screensaver!"

Funniest I recall was the "smiley" "virus" that was just a plaintext hoax message telling you to delete a vital windows system file that "was a virus" and happened to have a "smiley" icon. And make sure to forward this to all your friends.

Or something like that, memory not so good...

If they are using Outlook you can be pretty sure that the preview rendering engine can be subverted into giving you total control if they so much as allow a cursor to rest on the subject title. I think most of those gotchas *have* now been fixed but I would not like to bet on it.

I do not use Outlook for that reason and use a particularly obscure and totally paranoid mail client that recognises most file headers and acts accordingly no matter what file extension they have been given.

Close enough and being plaintext it sailed right through all antivirus defences and relied on social engineering to get the muppets to forward the lunacy to all their friends and then inflict damage to their PC. Always check with a reputable AV before forwarding anything like that!!!

I have some sympathy for Mordac here. Office users are not to be trusted

- they will click on anything that gets to their inbox!

Sure. But if the file has been renamed without a recognized extension, how can it be used to spread a document-borne virus or anything else?

It takes a lot of social engineering to induce a victim to rename an unsolicited .zip file before clicking on it. Such a victim shouldn't be allowed to use a computer without training. As when dealing with children, the rest of us shouldn't be constrained by the rules needed to keep these people from hurting themselves.

Unless someone can cite a specific instance where an attached file magically renamed itself to .zip, the point stands: IT policies are often not based on anything rational, are enacted to give the appearance of Doing Something, and harm rather than support the business.

If clicking on a .b5k file causes your system to do anything but complain about an unrecognized file type, you've got other problems. Did even the worst version of Windows or Office try to open and execute a file whose suffix or MIME type it didn't recognize? I don't remember ever seeing that happen, but I suppose nothing's impossible.

Recently I've worked with a client who blocks the entire .io domain at the firewall, and has other IT "security theater" policies worthy of the TSA. It's easy to see Mordac lurking around every corner of the cube farm when you run into things like this.

-- john

I don't know about *Outlook* before Office 2003 or so, but Outlook *Express* has been safe by default since Windows XP, and at least safe by proper configuration since I started using it (crusty old 98SE).

Some people blame the preview pane, but I've never had anything malicious execute with it operating. I don't go out of my way to attempt to execute viruses, but I've viewed them under my configuration settings (view as plain text first) with no effect.

By and large, complaints about OE are entirely propagated by those who irrationally denegrate it. Persons who, I might add, have no experience with the software in question, nor do they even know first-hand a person who has had experience with it!

Oddly, the same is true of those who complain of top posting...

Tim

Except for "irrationally".

Cheers

Phil "keelhaul all top-posters" Hobbs

It's a simulated count, the javascript responsible can be found at the bottom of the page source. It seems to use static costants and only depend on the current time.

Used mostly by people who don't know or don't care how insecure it is.

The last *really* serious threat was the defective JPEG rendering engine GDI+ exploit in November 2004. I actually did some work on defending other codecs from this buffer overrun vulnerability at the time. The exploit only worked as intended against GDI+ but it killed other decoders without actually gaining control of the PC.

I could go with that. I have to say that compared to Mickeysofts latest email client Outlook actually looks quite well behaved wrt the RFCs.

Windows 8 GUI incidentally looks like a cubists bad acid trip. YMMV

Have you tried a service like LeapFILE or YouSendIt. They get around most MORDACs because it is all https.

I have used LeapFILE for years at a corporate level and we have had only one customer (MORDAC) that we could not get around because they blocked http/https too.

=20

=20

There is also yenc. Though that does get zapped in some corporate firewalls.=20

?-)

they so=20

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Actually my biggest beef with outhouse express is the very high number of people who fiddle the settings to some screwed-up mess and then will never, even with guidance correct it. Most commonly they screw up quoting.

?-)

they so

those

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malicious

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experience

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Hmmm. I see that the original valid rationale for top posting was never explained to you. Not that it is valid today, but some of them came from that world.

?-)

they so

those

and

acts

proper

=20

Worst of all it has been properly foreshadowed by XP, Vista, and 7; not = to mention MSOriffice 2003, 2007 and 2010.

?-/

Wouldn't surprise a bit if they have it. I have 10 TB myself.

?-)

I have gumstick (flash drives) from 128 MiB to 32 GiB. One is a 32 GiB USB3 one, damn it is fast. I have only one computer that is fast enough to really wring it out. AMD 1075 hex core 3 GHz w/ 16 GiB ram.

I have less than zero sympathy for Mordacs. But then i have been consistently blessed with mostly competent IT support for decades. In response i try to treat them well. I also get superior performance from janitorial staff, i treat them well too. Could there be a pattern here?

?-)

Same with my wife, who works at an agency providing services to the disabled. All communications for providing services and billing to NY State are in zip files and the darn IT (mis)manager has all the computers locked down with ANY file attachments blocked. They are supposed to go to quarantine with a notification to intended recipient - but that doesn't work either. Curiously, his real name is Ivan (though it should be Igor).

Then there was that little snafu where finance sort of forgot to cash in two years worth of payment vouchers. Program nearly got shut down for not running on budget until my wife was able to prove that services had been rendered and billed for.

Business are filled with all sorts of trolls and n'eredowells.

My biggest Oracle/Agile-based customer has no idea of what we've shipped or what's still due, and worse, after we ship stuff and they receive it, they don't know where it is. It's hard to get paid under those circumstances.

They often call us, asking if we have copies of their own requirements documents and contracts and source code.

If they didn't have so much money...