Originally email consisted just of text messages. They were straightforward to read. It was very hard to send malware in a convincing way, since the recipient would have to extract any malicious attachment and run it by hand. There was a hoax in 1994 warning of the alleged “Goodtimes virus”, which caused a lot of merriment among the computer-literate. The only “virus” was the hoax email itself, which the less computer-literate forwarded to all their friends.
Then came HTML mail, a huge advance in email insecurity. Now malicious URLs could hide behind links or even be opened automatically. It could include JavaScript to exploit client weaknesses and trick recipients. Today, almost everyone recognizes these advantages, and malware and phishing by email are multi-billion-dollar businesses.
Doing it right, or not doing it at all
Even so, there are good and bad ways to create HTML mail. Continue reading
Technical issues with the Hunter Biden email
The PDF Association has an analysis of the file which the New York Post has uploaded to Scribd, which purports to show a message from Vadim Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden and Devon Archer. Discussions of what it signifies politically and whether Twitter was justified in blocking the link are for another place. The issue in this blog is what the file says about the authenticity of the email. The answer is: Nothing at all.
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