Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, November 29, 2001 at 1:58PM :
In Reply to: Virus senders posted by Kevin in Ohio on Wednesday, November 28, 2001 at 8:35AM :
I have gotten lots of blank emails lately with an underscore as the first character of the return address, but my system doesn't get infected because there's no automatic preview popup or whatever, because I'm one of the few knuckle-draggers still using Netscape (4.61) rather than Microsoft Outlook for email. It seems like all the nasty new viruses exploit Outlook "features" that aren't included in Netscape. I guess I don't know what I'm missing since Netscape works good enough for me. I did check the Norton info about this virus and determined that my computer is not infected.
I agree with Joe that while a picture (mypic.jpg) can't be infected, a virus can be disguised as a picture (mypic.jpg.exe) so that if you have "hide extensions for known file types" enabled, you'll just see "mypic.jpg" and end up running it by accident.