Actually, what I said is totally wrong.  I meant to say worms and not
macros. The prevalent viruses these days are the ones that replicate
themselves through VBS scripts executed inadvertently by people
double-clicking on attachments contained in email messages received by
Outlook.  A few months ago, we got a raft of such messages in the office
and one of our systems did not have the VBS association disabled.  The VBS
script walked on a bunch of files.  I even double-clicked on one by
mistake, but nothing happened, because VBS had been disabled.

The macro viruses are also easily avoided since there is a large, ominous
warning displayed by Word and Excel if you open a document with a macro.
 If you decide to go ahead and open it, with the macro enabled, you do so
forewarned and at your own risk.

Whilst most people know not to double-click on .exe files sent through
email, what was sneaky about the worm viruses was the use of a then-little
known extension, .VBS.  This came without warning to a lot of people.

Lookout will show you that a message has an attachment.  The vast majority
of the time, these attachments are simply .htm because people have set
their mail client to send messages as HTML.  Some are .txt messages when
Lookout has a difficulty translating a message.  The few messages that do
show up with .exe, .doc or .vbs are to be treated as malignant until they
are identified as harmless.  I always dump messages with .html and only
accept .exe and .doc from know sources with a proper message.  Still,
macros in Word and Excel are useful, they just trigger the message when you
open them, reminding you there are idiots out there that have absolutely
nothing better to do than to cause harm to as many strangers as they can.
 I like to think there is a special place in hell for such people, right
next to terrorists and child molesters.

Finally, there was a message on this thread about .zip files being
dangerous as they could unzip without warning.  I believe that is
incorrect.  In order to have a Zip file unzip spontaneously, it must be
made into a self-extracting file, which has a .exe extension.  It will not
have a .zip extension.  The .zip extension files must be opened with a zip
program such as WinZip, at which point you can decide if you want to
extract the files and run the programs or the VB scripts it may contain.

My point is that with a minimum of preparation and the exercise of some
awareness, you can be perfectly safe from the vast majority, if not all, of
nasty stuff that comes in through e-mail.

Disabling the VBS association, not running .exe files and exercising
caution with documents containing macros (heed that big warning!) will do
you good.

Thanks for pointing out my faux-pas, Bruce.


Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863   (281) 288-7438 Fax: (281) 288-7438
denys at hicomp.com             www.hicomp.com

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