Risks of Email Attachments

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Risks of Emails and Attachments There are many risks involved with receiving emails, most of which are viruses or spam mail which are a pain and potentially threatening to the victim’s computer. Most emails which are sent to the average user contain images, music or files for work, but some emails can be infected with dangerous and harmful attachments, which can harm your computer system. Since plain text emails are not able to transport viruses, viruses instead attach themselves to extra files sent via attachments to the email. Word documents are among the worst documents to send via an attachment on an email, because .doc files can easily have viruses or worms attached to them. They are commonly targeted for macro viruses because these can be easily embedded into MS Office binary files such as .doc Word documents. There are clues to whether an email may contain harmful content, one of which is the file name of any attachment. If it were to contain .exe it will be an executable file which could be harmful to your computer and carry viruses. Many worms and viruses try to hide the fact that it is an executable file by adding an alluring name like ‘win_pounds’ etc. or try to fool you into the fact that the file is not executable by using ‘work_resources.txt.vbs’ which might make the recipient of the email assume the email is a text file, when it is actually a Visual Basic Script file, e.g. Executable. Some hackers and viruses have the ability to use common email subjects in your inbox and create a similar one to send a virus. This allows the sender to pose themselves as a member of the victims address book and so meaning they do not think before opening the email. Many viruses also have the ability to gain access to the precipitants address book in order to frame themselves as you, in order to send the email to all addresses in your address book. This then means
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