Full Disclosure mailing list archives

Re: E-Mail viruses


From: "Incident List Account" <incidents () tooterfish com>
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 13:12:37 -0800

Curt, be carefull not to strain your arm patting yourself on the back :) I actually really like your solution UNTIL the 
"completely eliminates the need for antivirus on the mail server" comment. If an outside party follows the procedure 
and remnames his file to file1.inc and sends it to your user, are you 100% confident in that outside party's 
attachement is not inadvetantly infected with a virus? I agree that only allowing a certain obscure extension through 
to your user eliminates the VAST majority of the problems. I would not however trust any file from a third party with 
out some sort of scan.


Methinks you misunderstand.  Only the proprietary extension, i.e. .inc or
.xyz or .whatever, would be allowed through, and since virus writers would
never use this extension, it would eliminate ALL viruses at the gateway.
The nice thing about this approach is that it completely eliminates the need
for any anti-virus on the mail server since all virus attachments are
automatically dropped without the need for scanning.  Quite a simple, yet
elegant solution, if I do say so myself.

Curt Purdy CISSP, GSEC, MCSE+I, CNE, CCDA
Information Security Engineer
DP Solutions

----------------------------------------

If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, you will be hacked.
What's more, you deserve to be hacked.
-- White House cybersecurity adviser Richard Clarke

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