dowloading an e-mail attachment

[evanso]

what precautions shd be taken before downloading or opening an e-mail attachment?

[vehelpfulguy]

It depends who it has come from.

If one of your family sends a photo to you in jpg format of for example a family wedding then it may be OK.

If someone you have never heard of sends you an e-mail with an attachment saying it is someone famous in the nude be very careful.

The important thing is the last three letters of the file. If the file is a jpg picture, say of a wedding, the last three letter of the file will be jpg, and the file may be called wedding.jpg.

The most dangerous last three letters are EXE and SCR.

EXE is an executable, a program, and if you run this all sorts of things could happen on your machine.

SCR is a script file, and again if you run this it could do all sorts of things to your PC.

Be careful of people hiding the file type in the name of the file.

Recently I got an email with an attachement that made out it was a jpg.

They did this by using the letters jpg in the name of the file and then putting loads of full stops. The three letter file type was hidden way at the end

So the file was called something like

wedding.jpg...........................................exe

So if you get ANY file and you do not know what it is DO NOT download it, and do not OPEN it.

You should get a program like AVG anti virus that has an e-mail scanner. This will scan each attachment that comes in and let you know if contains a virus.

[stevie21]

I use gmail and they don't allow me to send or receive .exe files as attachments. Even if they're inside a zip file. Agree with watching out for those and for .scr

I would probably agree with taking note of who the email is from as the wedding example below is true : especially if you're expecting the photo. Then I'd trust it.
However, some worms/viruses work by sending themselves via email so they can still come from trusted sources. I wouldn't trust that an attachment is safe just because it's come from a friend.

I'd maybe also have a look at the email subject : a dodgy email at best will have something generic rather than "Mrs Evanso's 30th party" where you know Mrs Evanso has just turned 30.

Any attachment that you download, you should scan with your antivirus prog.