[NHCOLL-L:545] RE: Virus warning about e-mail to this group

[Peter Rauch]

On Thu, 20 Apr 2000, Rich Rabeler wrote:
> Since I had been told by the Virus specailists here at the U of M that one
> could not "get" a virus from e-mail unless you opened an attachment, this
> one kinda bothers me.

...unless "something" opens the "part" of the MIME multipart
message. With today's "smart" email browsers, "you" may not open
the attachment, but your program may have done so autonomously,
without you ever realizing it.
 
If you viewed the HTML-ized version of that particular message,
you were viewing the "attachment" that also contained the kak
worm. Whether or not your computer was infectable by the worm
--even if your emailer displayed the HTML form of the message--
is yet another story. 

The message was a multipart MIME-encoded message. The first part
contained a plain-text letter, and the second part contained the
same letter in html format _and_ the script of the kak worm. 
Everyone received the entire message, regardless of whether their
email program displayed it to the reader. Unless you have the
kind of computer software that can be infected by this particular
kind of worm, you needn't worry about having recieved the
message. See the URL cited earlier for a description of what kind
of system can be infected.
 
Peter