Make no mistake about it -- spam and viruses are deliberate, malicious assaults on our systems that often work together to penetrate and compromise our networks. A popular dirty trick by spammers is to plant malicious code in their spew to . . .
Make no mistake about it -- spam and viruses are deliberate, malicious assaults on our systems that often work together to penetrate and compromise our networks. A popular dirty trick by spammers is to plant malicious code in their spew to exploit recipients' systems. Remember jeem.mail.pv? Proxy-guzu? These sweet little Trojans, just two of many, compromise Windows boxes and turn them into spam servers. The moral here? Keep spam off your network and it will be considerably more secure.

While the vast majority of viruses, Trojans, worms, and other malware are aimed at Windows, users of Linux, Unix, BSD, and MacOS should not be complacent. You never know where the next exploit will be aimed. We'll look at server-level defenses in part 1 of combating the two-headed monster, while part 2 will cover the client side, including how to decode mail headers and recognize malicious code.

No matter how much we cajole, nag, pester, plead, implore, educate, and even threaten, it's inevitable that our users will continue to open malicious attachments. Why bother with a firewall at all when email rolls out the red carpet to viruses, worms, and Trojan horses? Anti-virus software and gateway software that scan message content and mime types are important and essential, but they simply can't catch everything. And even when users are well-behaved, certain email clients will happily execute malicious code without any user intervention. All the spam has to do is land in the user's inbox.

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