From a friend:

Internet Worms And Address Books

I am indebted to a PC Magazine for most of this information. I hope it is as helpful to you as it has been to me

The question is — do internet worms find addresses in the address books of all email programs, or are some, such as Outlook express, more prone to infection? Wondering if having a less popular email client such as The Bat, etc. would be a better bet.

Apparently, in the past it was true that using a non-MS email client was MUCH safer to prevent abuse of your address book(s), but that option to minimize risk is fading fast. The latest emailing worms/trojans are searching your hard drive for email addresses in all types of files.

This worm uses its own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) engine to send messages to all email addresses it obtains from files with the following extensions:

ABC, ABD, ABX, ADB, ADE, ADP, ADR, ASP, BAK, BAS, CFG, CGI, CLS, CMS, CSV, CTL, DBX, DHTM, DOC, DSP, DSW, EML, FDB, FRM, HLP, IMB, IMH, IMH, IMM, INBOX, INI, JSP, LDB, LDIF, LOG, MBX, MDA, MDB, MDE, MDW, MDX, MHT, MMF, MSG, NAB, NCH, NFO, NSF, NWS, ODS, OFT, PHP, PHTM PL, PMR, PP, PPT, PST, RTF, SHTML, SLK, SLN, STM, TBB, TXT, UIN, VAP, VBS, VCF, WAB, WSH XHTML, XLS, XML

The solution: you simply cannot be on the internet today without a well recognised virus checker. Personally I’m up for things that are low cost, so I use the excellent, industry recognised, “AVG” program which is free and which provides updates every day. AVG watches everything that goes in and out of your computer. If a Trojan appears, as it invariably will, it gives you the option to place it in a secure ‘vault’ for further research, or to delete it all together — my policy is ‘off with its head’.

April 2006