At 01:09 AM 08/18/2001 -0600, W. David Samuelsen wrote: >Since there are some sites using PDF, this alert came through >very good source - Edupage newsletter. The virus alerts through >this newsletter are extreme rare and posted only if there is >concerns. > >NEW VIRUS SPREADS USING ACROBAT FILES >Portable Document Format (PDF) files used in Adobe Acrobat are >susceptible to an experimental virus, according to analysis by >HispaSec Sistemas head Bernardo Quinteros and Privacy Foundation >CTO Richard M. Smith. Quinteros and Smith say the virus, >Outlook.pdf, embeds itself in PDF files via Outlook. Users who >open the file with Acrobat are encouraged to click on an image >of a peach, thus releasing the virus. The e-mail addresses in >Outlook's Address Book and its folder are used to spread >Outlook.pdf. "Since PDF files are considered safe by Internet >Explorer, it means that Acrobat security holes are easy to >exploit from Web pages and HTML e-mail messages," warned Smith. >(InfoWorld.com, 8 August 2001) Thanks, David. Once more, Outlook manages to weasel its way into a totally unrelated application and ruin things for everyone. Can't we just declare Outlook to be a virus and ban it? Cheryl *_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_*_* Cheryl Singhal (Singhals@erols.com) http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~cpafug/ http://www.rootsweb.com/~wvhampsh/ http://www.capaccess.org/com/troop763/ http://www.fortunecity.com/millennium/blyton/772/ (Bottony Cross DAR) http://www.rootsweb.com/~cresap/ http://members.fortunecity.com/csinghal1/ (Joanna Waddill UDC)

<snip> [someone wrote] Once more, Outlook manages to weasel its way into a totally unrelated application and ruin things for everyone. Can't we just declare Outlook to be a virus and ban it? <snip> In reality, the problem is not really the applications Outlook or Outlook Express but the fact that these two are the leading email applications in use worldwide. In the way that Internet Explorer is the leading browser, AOL is the leading Online Service Provider, and Windows is the leading Operating System. The security problems do not lie as much with these applications but with the following attitude of "hackers": "If I want to spread virii and TJs [Trojan Horse programs]to the widest possible number of computers then I have to configure them to get into Windows 9x or ME, Outlook and Outlook Express, and Internet Explorer. I could make it work with Pegasus or Linux but who uses that stuff?" words of a self proclaimed "hacker". So, by that token, if everyone migrates to Eudora and Netscape on a Linux platform then hackers will just change their method of attack to get those applications. Eudora, Netscape, and Linux are no safer security wise than Outlook, it's just that hackers are not targeting them. just a thought... CoachT