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E-mail Still a Threat even though Attachments are Less Dangerous

Not everyone of us enjoy the “pleasure” of observing the tendencies of hackers, crackers and other bad Internet folks with good computers security skills on a daily basis. It may not be apparent that this is a constantly and rapidly evolving Internet world, with the bad computer folks one step away from the good. Moreover, whether the good guys or bad are out front, shifts from day to day.

Until not long ago, the common way in which Internet viruses and worms were distributed was through contaminated attachments in e-mail. For years, people were told not to click on these attachments unless they trust the source of the email and is expecting that attachment or they have scanned it with an anti-virus software. The message finally began to get through- years later and hackers had a problem.

That’s good news, of course. But crackers are a resilient bunch, and their solution was to send spam with links seeking to get people to contaminated sites, where the real "dirty" work is done. The shift has been startling. One of Sophos's Senior Security Analyst said that;

The number of e-mails containing an infected attachment about 18 months was one in 47. Six months ago, it was one in 337 and it has remained relatively steady. Clearly, the threat has migrated from e-mail to the Web, but they still use e-mail as an initial means of contact. They’ve partnered with malware writers — spam guys — and have honed their craft.

It is true that cause and effect are hard to precisely gauge. The rise of Web 2.0 — the highly interactive and collaborative new phase of the Internet — plays a big role in this new mess. The nature of Web 2.0 makes it far easier for crackers to embed malicious code in the nooks and crannies of Web sites. This code sits there until unsuspecting Web users — both those brought by the spam and those lucky enough to show up on their own — stop by and get infected. Indeed, in many cases, just visiting the site without even clicking on anything is enough to get infected.

Due to this, I feel that a new approach is needed for sharing documents via email and on Internet. There are already ways for large enterprises to share documents via a centralized repository but what about the public users whom uses Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail service?

Recently, I came across file-sending service YousendIt.com whom also provides plug-ins for MS Outlook 2003 and many other applications which allows you to send attachments via a hyperlink within the body of your email. With a click on the hyperlink within your email, your email recipient can download these attachments easily.

After my first use, I exclaimed, "Hey! This is a great solution! You can send emails which are not more than 10KB in size and the attachments are just hyperlinks in your email body which your email recipients can downloaded from a centralized repository up to 2GB per file".

This could be the best, fastest and safest solution for digital content delivery for now. With Yousendit.com's innovative platform which empowers people to send, receive and track digital files on-demand, it will take a while for hackers and crackers to exploit this digital content delivery service to send spam with potential malicious software.

Till then, with YouSendIt’s reliable service, providing a convenient email attachment solution, an easy-to-use FTP replacement, and eliminates the need to send files on disk with an overnight courier service as you can send attachments as large as 100MB for the free account up to 2GB for the Corporate Suite account with a good Privacy Policy and DMCA governance, this could be the solution that we have all been looking for.



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