Junk mail can be REALLY nasty
As if you needed another reason to not like SPAM ( no, not the hormel product, we’re talking junk mail here.) A couple days ago I mentioned a post at the sans institute talking about an email that was circulating and the link within that email took you to a malicious site (redirected) and attempted to exploit one of the recently disclosed Windows vulnerabilities. The Security Fix talks about another in the recent round of expoit attempts and this one comes disguised as junkmail.
The code to exploit the flaw is not written correctly apparently and causes the system to crash. The point of the whole story is this….. Many people (thankfully) have learned to be suspicious of attachments in email. Some still think that unexpected attachments from people they know are ok. THIS is a mistake. Be suspicious of ANY unexpected email attachment. Further be suspicious of ANY link in an email. Especially if you’re using Windows and Internet Explorer (as it is by far most targetted platform/browser at this point.) Many times here on this site I’ve talked about investigating links in suspect emails and visiting sites that were trying to scam people. I take several precautions against infecting a system when I do this. (The main defence being that I run linux instead of Windows.) Don’t play with fire unless you’re prepared to get burned.