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| Paul Ducklin dares users to adopt the retro-cool
chic of ASCII email this Christmas. |
The glitter has already been stripped from snazzy Christmas
email messages by this week's W32/Zafi-D worm, warns Sophos,
a world leader in protecting businesses against viruses and spam.
The latest variant in the Zafi family, which seems to originate
from Hungary, sends emails with attachments which contain a
Christmas surprise of a most unsatisfactory sort.
Other viruses in recent days, such as the W32/Atak-I and W32/Atak-J worms, have also
adopted the disguise of seasonal greetings in an attempt to
spread.
"Email offers a range of funky digital ways to pass on your best
wishes," said Paul
Ducklin, Head of Technology, Asia Pacific for Sophos. "But you
can be as polite, incisive, witty, humble, risque, funky, caring -
you name it - in words as you can in any number of HTML, JPG, EXE
or SCR files."
Ducklin is challenging computer users to be daring this
Christmas and - if they wish to send email greetings - to send them
as plain text ASCII.
"If anyone tells you that you're being an old-timer, just tell
them that ASCII is the new binary and raise your eyebrows
knowingly. With the right fashion pressure, we can put HTML email
out to pasture by early 2005," said Ducklin.
Sophos recommends companies protect their email gateways with a
consolidated solution to thwart the virus
and spam threats as well as secure their desktop and servers with
automatically updated anti-virus protection.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.