Our mail systems do not allow 36 directly executable attachment types and
it has not hindered our business one flea speck. We have not been infected
by a single email virus since Melissa that can be traced back through our
email gateways.
The magic words that were used was "directly executable", to me meaning
that there is no user action that has to take place for the code to be
executed.
<rant>
I remember the good ol' days when I could say with my head held high, "No,
just opening an email message will not give you a virus- it is just text."
Thanks to the "Evil Empire", creator of non-RFC compliant, buggy, unsecured,
U-do-it-like-we-tell-U2- lookOut or express lookOut. I have to hang my head
low and nod, when some poor client has his preview pane on and gets infected
with the latest hourly exploit. Want to blame someone?
</rant>
We therefore do not allow any directly executable code without it being
zipped, gzipped, tar's, stuffed, extension renamed, or any other action that
will "safe" it and not allow it to run unopposed.
As long as a sender knows this, there is no issue with doing a little prep
work before sending. Not only that, it is less expensive to the mailing
systems.
Regards,
Damon Sauer
-----Original Message-----
From: asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org [mailto:asrg-admin(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org]On
Behalf Of Eric
S. Johansson
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 8:33 AM
To: Jonathan Morton
Cc: Brad Knowles; asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: [Asrg] 6. Email Path Verification (hashcash benchmarks)
Jonathan Morton explained:
I did the same with SpamAssassin when Sobig.F started hitting me with
hundreds per day (bounces and infections alike). I manually set the
MICROSOFT_EXECUTABLE score to 10.0 (the default score is only 0.3) and
set up Procmail to dump messages above 8.0. I'm pretty sure that dealt
with over 99% of the problem.
I personally think that nearly all ISPs, especially those with a large
proportion of newbies, should delete directly-executable attachments
without question.
while there is an autocratic part of me that agrees most heavily with what
you
say, I also fear the hubris inherent in the situation. This is what I think
in
isolation place or spamtrap equivalent is what is called for. That way the
user
can determine whether or not they really want that piece of e-mail. On the
gripping hand however I have rarely received an executable by e-mail from
anyone
except someone I have had long conversations with (i.e. OEM technical
support)
the nice thing about a spamtrap (at least the way I have
designed/implemented)
is that I can get an audit trail of messages and who approved them. So in
the
case of a virus, you can know which employee is a FWM and started the
infection
process.
---eric
*****
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