As I'm going through the thousands of emails in my inbox I keep coming across subjects like "(big corporation) Antivirus Email Gateway Notification" with headers that seem to confirm the origin. These emails say things like, "Sender, the following email was blocked due to containing an attached file that violates (big corporation) email security policy."

Do the IT managers of this massive corporation really not know how Windows email trojans work? Do the antivirus vendors not know? Is the IT world filled with that many incompetent people? How is bouncing gazillions of "you are not in compliance with (big company) security policies" to innocent people who are not, and further cannot be, infected help anything? Surely they can disable this in their software. If not, most of these companies are large enough that they could demand from the antivirus vendor that these embarrasing features be removed.

As the conspiracy nuts would claim: maybe it is some sort of screwball advertising policy. How better to spam people? It gets the company name out there, albeit not in a very flattering light, and there's a certain level of plausible deniability involved. The average computer user would probably be grateful for such a false warning. And they might even find a virus on their computer as a result.

Oh well, at least a copy of the virus wasn't attached... Almost everyone seems to have shut that feature off long ago.

BTW, my mail server discards any email with a Microsoft Executable attached. So sorry. Try a zip file or something if you legitimately want to get something through to me.

Labels: windows