James, as you are well aware, a user of a Microsoft Desktop or Server OS is not required to use Outlook for email. Mozilla Thunderbird works quite well on Microsoft OS's and of course there is Evolution. I should add that, just as Microsoft has mitigated/eliminated well known vulnerabilities in earlier versions of the Microsoft OS's through the release of improved versions of their OS's including Sever 2003/2008, XP SP1/2/3, and Vista and Vista SP1, Microsoft has also mitigated/eliminated many vulnerabilities in the components of earlier versions of Microsoft Office with the release of Microsoft Office 2007. Best Regards, John Holmblad Acadia Secure Networks, LLC James Knott wrote: > kenneth marken wrote: > >>> Bottom line, there are a lot of technical and usage reasons that make it >>> much harder for malware to attack Linux/Unix. >>> >>> >>> >> the "big" problem here is that the target for said malware have >> changed... >> >> its no longer about bringing down whole systems. these days its the >> users data they are after. credit card info, codes of all kinds, and >> just about anything else. >> >> was there not a sweep of ransom attacks where a worm would archive the >> whole content of the users document dir, and encrypt the archive? >> leaving a message to send x amount of money to some account for the >> password? >> >> under these situations, read access is more then enough access, most >> of the time. >> >> the only option i can see for the user then is to run every program he >> tries to make use of online, inside some kind of chroot can. but even >> thats not perfect. >> >> basically, the only really safe option is to yank that plug, and use >> only home-coded apps... >> > > Again, it's harder. In Outlook, for example, a virus attached to an > email could run as soon as the message was read, without the user having > to do anything. For a virus to run in Linux, the user would have to: > 1) detach the file > 2) make it executable > 3) manually run it > > In short, it won't run without the user taking 3 deliberate steps to run it. > > _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@xxxxxxxxx https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users
