Mary Fisher wrote:

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...


Sorry, I thought we had been through this before Christmas...


Your memory is better than mine :-)

Ah, well have a look on you hard drive, you will have a folder where you
stored all the responses that you planed to read when you got back,
sorry don't know what you called the folder ;-)

See:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/...3fa45 fb576b9
http://tinyurl.com/5lfzo


Many folks have no problem with OE, however they unwittingly *cause* them
for thousands of others as a result of malicious software they end up
running as a result of using OE.


And no other systems cause problems?

In reality yes, but usually as a result of users doing something daft.
The lions share of compromised systems that I see (running at several
per week at the moment) got that way through IE/OE security flaws.

I am not trying to paint a black and white argument here of "IE/OE bad",
"anything else good". IE/OE can be used safely with care and lots of
added third party protection (and previous threads would suggest you
have this). You can and will get problems with other programs, but you
have to work harder at it (many compromises require ActiveX controls,
and browser helper objects for example that you typically need IE to run).

I am not suggesting that this is the case with your computer, so don't
think I am having a go at you personally, just highlighting that because
you have "no problem with OE", it is not safe to extrapolate that to a
broader class of users.


Well, you can protect yourself by blocking me.

Ah, well now you have hit the nail on the head. That is why the spammers
love relaying spam via compromised windows boxes. 100M spams flowing
from a single well connected host is easy to identify/filter/
block/blacklist/litigate against, but 100 spams from 1M different hosts
can't be blocked in the same way.

(Current estimates put this route as the source of over 2/3rds of all
spam, and almost all (Distributed) Denial of Service attacks).


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/