E-mail Clients Blamed For Infections

As usual, hackers have just found an even better and more elusive way of infecting one's computer. As it has been earlier stated, there has been a spam outburst lately, a big part of the messages being trojan infested. Neither spam nor trojans are new stuff to security software developers, but recently, cyber-criminals thought of a way to outfox e-mail clients by using one of their strengths.

Have you ever noticed that all programs that are over-zealous in helping their clients sometimes do something unnecessary or annoying? Well, now they even help hackers by using one of their features that was supposed to make the users' life easier. To be more exact, e-mail clients sometimes transform text into links, without a hyper text mark-up language (HTML) command being issued to them. Some will automatically turn addresses as address.com into a link to the certain domain.

And here's the problem - when the anti-spam software scans the message it does not notice any links, therefore it marks it as "clean". But then, the e-mail client turns the text into a clickable link when they recognize the website, as stated by NetworkWorld experts. And that wouldn't be much of a problem either if users were not so gullible and wouldn't trust the link. Many people are somewhat slothful and wouldn't copy and then paste the link in their browsers, but since it's clickable, it's a lot easier and more tempting to follow the link. So what the hackers have actually done, is transmit links while still being able to avoid security modules.

Sure, this will never work on some people, but the thing is that they have put back into practice one of the oldest methods there was.
It's all downhill: after eluding security - user clicks, he gets infected. Unless he has an anti-virus, but note that there are some viruses that may pass as undetected. So, the best thing is NOT to click.