Re: VIRUS WARNING (dubious) for XYWRITE digest

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

E J Inggs wrote:

> My university's F-Secure firewall rejected Digest 1078 but it gives no indication which particular message was infected.
>
> Apart from the list of messages, the messages themselves were deleted.

Virii have occasionally made their way into this list, as in the case several days ago. I found
several things about those
messages suspicious, starting with the Sender's name being Clarissa (there was an infamous Clarissa
email virus not too long
ago), so I manually deleted them right then and there.

However, there can also be false alarms. Current version McAfee continues to flag one of the
XyList Zip archives from 2000
(I have all the "back issues" stored on my hard drive), with the message below.

F:\XY-LIST\ARCHIVES\XYLST00.ZIP\XY04.00 ... Found the JS/Kak@M virus !!!

Perhaps there really is something in there, but I think McAfee is reacting to a 7-bit encoded
program in that archive, which
in any event would have to be run through some decoder (XX or UU most likely) before it would even
turn into anything other
than an inert stream of characters.

Jordan