E-mail Malware

Can you get infected by just viewing an e-mail? What about for IM messages? Could malware somehow manipulate the code to automatically activate?

 

I suppose if you allow HTML to be used in emails it could contain some exploit. In which case exploit code would run against your system/email software success would then of course depend on how well patched your system is/will your security software detect it.


Personally I am not aware of any "plain text attacks" regarding email. And the IM thing would probably be heavily dependent on which IM program you use and if it has any vulnerabilities. Again, I am not aware of any "plain text attacks", more dangerous is user randomly clicking spammed links.

 

Thanks. Are there any known exploits which can exploit html without requiring user intervention?

 

HTML is code... thus no exploit is needed... if you execute it, it runs and does whatever is programmed into it... including calling other programs without your intervention...

Regards -
-Bob