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Subject:Re: Standard Purity From:"Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 29 Nov 2002 18:22:04 -0600 (CST)
On Fri, 29 Nov 2002, Gary S. Callison wrote:
> begin LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs
> AIEEEEEEEE! Embrace and extend! Plaintext not good enough for email!
> end
> If that shows up as an attached file or a virus in your mailreader, thank
> Microsoft for 'extending' RFC822. It's not an attached file OR a virus,
> it's three lines of ASCII text that I typed into Pico by hand. Ergo: it's
> not an extension of the standards at all, it's simply a broken
> implementation of them.
In what strikes me as comic irony, immediately after sending this, I got
back virus warnings from three different systems.
1)
Antigen for Exchange found LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs matching FILE
FILTER= *.vbs file filter.
The file is currently Removed. The message, "Re: Standard Purity", was
sent from Gary S. Callison and was discovered in SMTP Messages\Inbound
located at NONSTOP Solutions, Inc./NONSTOPHQ/SFOOWA01.
2)
Trend SMEX Content Filter has detected sensitive content.
Place = TECHWR-L; ; ; Gary S. Callison
Sender = Gary S. Callison
Subject = Re: Standard Purity
Delivery Time = November 29, 2002 (Friday) 17:49:26
Policy = Virus List (Executables)
Action on this mail = Quarantine message
Warning message from administrator:
Content filter has detected a virus.
3)
MailMarshal (an automated content monitoring gateway) has stopped
the following message:
Message: B00024dc60.00000001.mml
From: huey -at- interaccess -dot- com
Subject: Re: Standard Purity
Because it believes the message or an attachment to this message contains
a VBScript commands.
Now, this is a fine example of what Andrew mentioned- companies taking it
upon themselves to build on standards. Each one of these content filters
is built on the same broken standard where Outlook will interpret a string
of "<CR><LF>begin {filename}" as the beginning of a UUencoded file,
regardless of whether or not the message headers say "Content-type:
text/plain" or not. Never mind that every computer programmer learns,
usually very early on in their career, "don't execute your data".
I wonder how many of these systems will trigger on the followup...
--
Huey
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