Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/01/reg_gets_yaha_treatment/

Reg gets Yaha treatment from top exec

O dear O dear...

By John Lettice

Posted in Security, 1st July 2002 12:16 GMT

Ah, the perils of profile. Every morning The Register has to get out the shovel and the wheelbarrow to deal with the huge pile of viral dross infesting the inbox. Well OK, we just use the delete button really, but it's still ordinarily a pretty tedious process. But just occasionally, you get a shipment that cheers you up immensely - it's still dross, granted, but dross from Very Important People working for Huge Companies Who Should Know Better.

For just over an hour now a computer apparently belonging to the vice president of technology solutions, EMEA for one of the major players in the Internet, e-business and database software markets (no, not Microsoft, we said major) has been sending us Yaha at approximately six minute intervals. Or to be strictly accurate, it's really been sending us empties because at the bottom of each it says:

[Filename: ...scr, Content-Type: application/octet-stream]
An attachment was removed from this message per * Corp Security Policy. This type of file is often used to transmit viruses or malicious payloads

Names deleted to protect the probably guilty. But it's not Sun either - got it yet, people? But it's thoughtful of the corporate mail system to monitor outgoing traffic so it can remove dangerous junk, while still allowing its operatives to spam all their contacts with harmless junk.

We've had a look at the message headers, and while this sort of stuff can look like it comes from an email ID when in reality it doesn't, this lot looks pretty genuine. But considering how crazy the company's boss (what do you mean you still haven't got it?) might go if he found out, we've decided to spare the VP's blushes. For the moment. Now, have you ever considered booking a major promotional campaign with The Register? ®