The Null Device

"You have received E-card"

The rather eye-opening dissection of an online greeting-card spam; an email telling the user to go to a web site to see an electronic greeting card, and the website in question, which uses Internet Explorer security holes to overwrite your Windows Media Player and install a keylogger apparently programmed to look for online banking sites (and undetectable by current spyware detectors). Nasty; and another reason to not use IE (or, preferably, Windows). (via Slashdot)

There are 2 comments on ""You have received E-card"":

Posted by: Ben http:// Tue Feb 17 14:20:03 2004

Fuck, I think I might have gotten that a couple of days ago. It had an e-card of some woman's backside which I could wiggle and twist around. I've re-installed media player, run spybot and I'll have to get my brother in to do some disinfecting, until then no online banking I guess.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Tue Feb 17 14:36:13 2004

Or get yourself a recent Macintosh. (New eMacs can be had cheaply; meanwhile, the cheapest iBooks are under $2,000 and worth it.) There aren't any worms for MacOS X, though in case someone writes one, make a non-administrator account and use that for downloading porn/flash games/stupid shit, and another account for banking.

If you don't have $2k to spare, get Linux and install that on your PC. Though it requires more knowledge and maintenance than OSX.