[nos-bbs] interesting - pop mail to read WW area :)

[Michael Fox - N6MEF]

If you set up JNOS to also accept email from clients like Thunderbird, and
if you have an email gateway to the Internet (or you allow JNOS to talk
directly to Internet mail servers [yikes!!!!]), then this also opens up the
ww account for sending Internet email spam.

If it's just one person using a BBS, that's one thing.  But if you're
sharing the ww account amongst multiple users so they can all use this
method of retrieving bulletins, then the chances of creating a spam problem
are significant.  

Estimates range between 10%-30% of home computers are infected with some
sort of virus/malware.  And we've probably all received email from someone's
hacked account in the last month or two.  You don't want JNOS to be a vector
for that.

Michael, N6MEF

FYI:

Home User Statistics

According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report and Consumer Reports
the following home user statistics illustrate the impact of viruses to your
average American.

1. 24 million households experience heavy spam.
2. 16 million households have experienced a serious virus problem in the
past two years.
3. 8 million of households have had spyware in the past 6 months.
4. 1 million households lost money or compromised accounts from misused
phishing.
5. The estimated cost of all households impacted by viruses, spyware, and
phishing is $4.55 billion.
6. 40% of household are affected by viruses.
7. 32% of the world’s computers are infected with some type of malware.

Virus Threats by Type

A listing of the types of viruses and percentages of those that impact
users.

1. Viruses – 57%
2. Misc. Trojans – 21%
3. Trojan Downloaders – 7%
4. Unwanted Software – 4%
5. Adware – 3%
6. Exploits – 3%
7. Worms – 2%
8. Password Stealers and Monitoring Tools – 2%
9. Backdoors – 1%
10. Spyware – 0.01%




-----Original Message-----
From: nos-bbs <nos-bbs-bounces at lists.tapr.org> On Behalf Of M Langelaar
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 8:55 PM
To: TAPR xNOS Mailing List <nos-bbs at lists.tapr.org>
Subject: [nos-bbs] interesting - pop mail to read WW area :)

My so called WORLD area for bulletins is @ww

Out of a hunch, decided to put an entry into my /jnos/popusers file :

   ww:mypassword:

then setup thunderbird for pop3, leave messages on server, user 'ww'.

Dirty way to download all the bulletins to thunderbird, a bit slow if you
have 720 of them, so download headers only, still a bit slow, so maybe
more the reason for me to rewrite some of that to store each message
in it's own file then one huge file for all of them - maildir vs mbox 
... Not
the first time I've thought about it, the last time was years ago :(

Anyways, in case anyone is curious, that actually works if you need
something, even if it means setting up a separate email account just for
the one ww 'user' or whatever other bulletin area you're interested in.

Maiko