Melissa and LoveLetter made use of the trust that exists between friends or colleagues. Imagine receiving an
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from a friend who asks you to open it. This is what happens with Melissa and several other similar email
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. Upon running, such worms usually proceed to send themselves out to email addresses from the victim"s address book, previous emails, web pages
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.
As administrators seek to block dangerous email attachments through the recognition of well-known
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, virus writers use other extensions to circumvent such protection. Executable (.exe) files are renamed to .bat and .cmd plus a whole list of other extensions and will still run and successfully infect target users.
Frequently, hackers try to penetrate networks by sending an attachment that looks like a flash movie, which, while displaying some cute animation, simultaneously runs commands in the background to steal your passwords and give the
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access to your network.