Just an observation: I’ve received two unexpected e-mail attachments from people I don’t know in the past hour. I figured the first one was an honest mistake–for some reason I get e-mail intended for other people from time to time–but when I got a second one and it, too, was little more than a smiley and an attachment, I started to think something strange is going on.
Your antivirus software should catch anything floating around, but if it’s too new, you can still get bitten. It’s never a good idea to open unexpected attachments. Bad things can happen.
Even at work, where we pass attachments around like candy, our standard practice is to announce the attachment is coming, or to follow it up with, “Hey, did you get my e-mail?” It cuts down on the number of unfortunate accidents.
So don’t open unexpected attachments. Especially if you’re seeing a sudden flood of smileys with weird attachments.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.