From: Mike Friedman (mikef@ack.berkeley.edu)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 16:40:31 PST
On Mon Nov 18 15:11:53 2002, Debra Goldentyer said:
> At today's web editor's meeting, it came up that lots of us are getting
> that odd little popup window that offers free diplomas or some such.
>
> This was passed on to me as a way to make those alerts go away. I could
> find no evidence that this is bogus, so I'm trying it--you may want to try
> it as well.
>
> http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/answerstips/story/0,24330,3374542,00.html
>
> If you do know that this is bogus or in any way harmful, please email the
> list. Thanks.
Debra,
Just keep in mind that turning off the Messenger service (which is what that
web page recommends) may deprive you of a legitimate Windows facility on
which you are currently depending. For example, if you are used to getting
pop-up messages from your printer when your files have finished printing,
this would no longer work. And you may have other applications that also use
the Windows Messenger service to communicate with you.
(In fact, at some later point, SNS may use pop-ups to notify the owner
of a Windows box when we discover a blank Administrator password or other
vulnerability as result of our scanning of campus machines, if no contact
email address is available).
If you don't mind doing without the potentially legitimate uses of the
Messenger service on your machine, turning it off should successfully
stop its use for spamming.
Mike
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Mike Friedman System and Network Security
mikef@ack.Berkeley.EDU 2484 Shattuck Avenue
1-510-642-1410 University of California at Berkeley
http://ack.Berkeley.EDU/~mikef http://security.berkeley.edu
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