Just got a call from my wife who says she has killed her work PC & that the IT guys have implicated her accessing a Hotmail account. Is this possible? She is aware of the danger of opening attachments from unknown people & says she hasn’t done so. Can she have got the virus from just opening e-mails & not attachments? Sorry I’m an IT idiot!

Would have to open an attachment, and I reckon Hotmail would have picked up the infected document, and denied her access to download it.

She’s been at the pr0n again.

Anything is possible, but it’s very unlikely unless hotmail has been hacked to infect your machines.

unlikely to be directly from hotmail.

my wife got a virus via a Java exploit at the weekend and didn’t actually need to ‘download’/open anythign to install it which was worrying.

Is the issue she shoudln;t have been on hotmail on a work pc? If that’s not a problem then I’d throw it back to the IT guys for not securing their infrastructure properly in the first place…

Possible, yes. Likely, no. The name of the infection would help.

I strongly suspect that it’s IT’s way of applying leverage to stop you using Hotmail, in a “we told you so” sort of way (as opposed to doing something sensible like blocking it).

Reverse-engineering the source of an infection is usually very difficult (though it’s degrees easier in a controlled corporate environment), I’d be surprised / impressed if they can tell where it’s come from with any degree of certainty.

my wife got a virus via a Java exploit at the weekend

I keep saying this, but Flash / Java drive-bys are the single most common injection points I’m seeing these days. Updating Java and all the Abobe plugins to latest versions is my number one “how do I prevent infections” tip at the moment.

Crap IT at work would be my simple conclusion – and if its that poor they ought to block access to ‘free’ email.

I keep saying this, but Flash / Java drive-bys are the single most common injection points I’m seeing these days

Interested in how the Java ones work.

Possibly.

Is accessing hotmail against company policy? If it isn’t then they haven’t got a reason to complain, and should probably just educate her on email/virus safety. If it is then they can report her and follow whatever discipline route is required, but I shouldn’t think they are in a position of authority to tell her off.

Interested in how the Java ones work.

“Remote code execution” exploits in the Java engine.

Maybe others, I’m not a Java dev.

Thus.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/mmpc/archive/2010/10/18/have-you-checked-the-java.aspx

Spikey.