Outlook Express virus protection?

[Froghead]

Hi all. The two most commonly asked questions by my customers in the past couple of weeks have been.

1 - My Antivirus program was running so how did I get the Yaha.K virus?

2 - Outlook Express won't let me open attachments.

Well, we all know that if virus patterns aren't up to date the latest virus will sneak in.

I've also had to tell many customers that a recent Windows Update (I don't know which one exactly) to Outlook Express 6.0 has added a Security feature that blocks attachments that may potentially contain a virus to be saved or opened.
This feature can be disabled by opening OE60 and going to tools>options>security and unchecking the appropriate box under Virus Protection.

After days of telling people how to disable it I started to think well maybe this is not a bad thing after all. If everyone had it enabled it may have cut down on the recent spread of Yaha.K and the likes.

So here's my question: Is having the OE60 "virus protection" feature enabled a good thing?

Hope to here everyone's opinion.


Bonus question Will the OE6.0 virus protection "feature" get crippled by the next good virus.

[NooNoo]

In general it's a good thing... people WANTING to receive attachments have to state the file has to be zipped. It raises the level of awareness in the user because s/he has to actually do something other than click with only one eye half open.

People who do not like this security feature, I have found, also do not like having to remember passwords, or login... most likely they keep their pins on a list in their wallets too!

[craigmodius]

I think it's a good thing. It saves people from themselves at a minor inconvenience. I want to do this for (to) the (L)users on my network.

Also you can receive a zip file, or have the other people give it a fake extension and rename the extension after saving it.

will it be disabled by the next good virus? Maybe, maybe not, but that auto-preview feature is dangerous too. As well as blindly clicking on a link.

[confus-ed]

Aren't attatchments just for people who are too dumb to work ftp?

Outlook whether express or no is just one big security risk...

[Froghead]

Well I pretty much answered my own question today.

Here's what happened.

On Jan 11th I received an email from [email protected] containing an attachment called untitled1.pif. The attachment was blocked by OE6. I flashed up NAV and scanned the file (Jan 9th virus defs) and it came up clean. Assuming it was probably a virus anyways I went to Symantec website and did a quick search for untitled1.pif. See the following link

http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/[email protected] [/URL]

I ran NAV liveupdate for latest defs (jan 10th) and then just for fun tried to open the attachment to see what would happen. First I had to disable the attachment blocking in OE6 then I got two more warnings from OE about the dangers of viruses and mailciuos code etc before OE would allow me to open it. NAV deleted it immediately.

For me I'll leave it on but it's sure going to cut down on my virus removal business