Leader Next Human Sandwich

[EdenMaster]

I recieved this email in my GMail account today, and laughed so hard I had to share it with you guys. What follows is the absolute, unchanged, unadulterated text of the email I recieved. Comprehend if you dare:

<b>Subject:</b>
DONT PAY THOUSAND FOR SAME SOFTWARE, WE SELL AT ONLY $15-60 FOR ALL SOFTWARES money

<b>Message:</b>
pride corner arms somewhere music gym,
taught back motor use studied bad. a reference fire turning?
pride or fascinate human window? miserable young speaking the pride. allow different next principle being?
leader next human sandwich,
principle mischievous added anything music commit?



Also an attachment I wouldn't open if I had a gun to my head.

At first I thought it was bad translation but...I can't even make out what they were TRYING to say!

Discuss :D

[Dark Jaguar]

That was NEVER supposed to get out!

*sigh*, look into my shiny pen.

[A Black Falcon]

Random words to try to get it past the spam filter, I think...

[N-Man]

Random words to try to get it past the spam filter, I think...

But... I mean, if it's spam, isn't it supposed to make a modicum of sense? You know, to try to sell him something?

Christ it was simpler back in the days, when spam told you plainly and clearly that enlarging your dick by X inches would cost Y amount of money...

[EdenMaster]

I don't suspect it was spam, that attachment is probably a virus. Maybe they're hoping the gibberish will get it past the spam filters and the person recieving it will be dumb enough to think that the attachment is something to make sense of it or something.

Or, it's some sort of information pertaining to the single intelligible sentence, the title. In which case it's spam.

...

Nope. It's gotta be a virus. It's the only explanation.

*delete*

[N-Man]

Maybe they're hoping the gibberish will get it past the spam filters and the person recieving it will be dumb enough to think that the attachment is something to make sense of it or something.

Yeaah...

"leader next human sandwich... leader.. next... human... sandwich?! OH GOD, IT'S A SIGN FROM THE MESSIAH!! THE TIME HAS COME!" *frantically clicks attachment*

[Great Rumbler]

Open the attachement on a public computer.

[EdenMaster]

All of a sudden I'm hungry for a sandwich. Fancy that.

[Dark Jaguar]

You deleted it? Okay, yes that was the right choice.

However be sure to empty your deleted items folder as well, just to be sure it's gone forever.

[EdenMaster]

I forgot that GMail allows you to "View" something before actually downloading it, and it does check emails for viruses automatically, so I bravely chose to view whatever the attachment was.

This is what awaited me:
----------------------------------
Instant Download Software
We give you LICENSE instantly!
Fast Respond Customer Support To serve u Better

XP Pro SP2, MS Office Pro 2OO3, Creative Suite v2, All Ad0be softwares, Macromedia and 250 more


thats C1ICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD development
-----------------------------
It should also be noted that in invisible text (that is, text the same color as the background) read:

<i>wife news studied a, love again servants? speaking motor social slow.
again social whom light? pretty somewhere benefit mentioned sugar.</i>

The baffle-osity meter is off the charts here, people!!

[Darunia]

I need some cheap software and human sandwiches... mine are almost out... can you forward that to me, EM?

[Weltall]

ASM sent you an email?

*goes to hell*

[Dark Jaguar]

It's just random gibberish! There is no code there! It is good that you can't make sense of it as it is nonsense!

And technically, you did in fact download it in order TO view it. It's just that it was a block of text so it was fine. I'm not so sure you could somehow view an executable.

As a general rule, a .txt file is a harmless attachment. A .doc file on the other hand...

[A Black Falcon]

The invisible text is for spam filters. Doesn't usually work, but they try... as for the rest, who knows...

[Darunia]

Ryan! Haha I was thiiiis close to saying something along those lines.... THIIIIS close....! :D

[Dark Jaguar]

Spam filters don't care what color the text is. Further, how does ADDING text get by a filter? Unless the rule is set up to ONLY allow e-mail that has that weird text, it could only potentially get it blocked.

[lazyfatbum]

just so you know deleting a file doesn't erase it from your HDD. The only thing that actually erases a file is when it is overwriten by something else. hence the use of the recycle bin. If you load an item in there and it suddenly disappears after a few days, it's been overwriten by something else. The best thing to do is actually delete a file is get a program that will take the file and exchange it to random 1's and 0's on the HDD killing it forever.

The attachment was nothing harmful, it was just another way to scape past your spam filters. as far as I know, there's no way to trojan a txt or doc.

[Dark Jaguar]

You can put harmful macros in a .doc file.

And, you misunderstand the nature of files. The "recycle bin" actually is a special folder on the drive. When you "delete" a file in such a way as to send it to the recycle bin, it is actually moved to that folder and is NOT actually deleted. It is THERE. If the file disappears, it's not because it was overwritten, because it is in fact protected for a period of time while in that folder. It simply means you either emptied the folder, and deleted it's reference from the file system, or various settings like time and amount of space that has been assigned to that folder have expired and thus it was deleted then. That space the recycle bin has assigned to it won't just get overwritten, because it is assigned and the OS itself decides what to do with it. It's not Norton, it's just a special folder where "deleted" files go.

If you want to directly delete a file without it still taking up your hard disk space (which it DOES if it is in your recycle bin), then just hold shift while deleting a file. It skips the recycle bin completely and just removes it's entry from the file allocation table. That's how standard file deletion works. Even if it "vanishes" from that recycle bin of yours lazy, guess what? It's still ON your hard disk. NOW the rules you listed about how the information is still actually on your hard drive hold true. The OS now has no way to GET to this, not without some special program that lets you sort through all that junk data in the "unallocated" space. If you overwrite it, then it's "gone", but since those 1's and 0's are, in the real world, actually magnetism, they may be weakened but are still there and even an overwritten file can be recovered by a technician. What must be done is to overwrite the file over and over again until there is no magnetic trace left on the drive to be recovered. There are programs that can do this.

[lazyfatbum]

I got to work with a guy who does file recovery, so you're full of shit, thank you for playing, go home. A file is always on your computer, it never, ever leaves, until it is over writen. the recycle bin acts like a folder as you said, that tells the computer that these files can be overwriten and the date and time they were put in the 'folder'. That's why you put them there, even after they're gone thy can still be recovered by special file recovery which will take the huge chunk or cluster and fill in the holes with the appropriate data to recover the full file. if only a small chunk can be recovered, then it will hhave massive holes meaning that only a few parts of the file can be recovered.

When you hold shift, or if 'The file is to big for the recycle bin', you're simply not logging the deletion of the file. It's removed from the shell of the OS but still on your HDD, it is only now marked as 'to be overwriten'. Pressing shift means that you can easily recover the file, but a special program can. A file is only permanently deleted when it is over writen, that is a fact.

[Dark Jaguar]

The "shell of the OS"? By the way, read the whole thing on what I said. I DO in fact know of what I speak, because I deal with this stuff all the time.

I mean, I frickin' SAID everything you just said. I was correcting YOU with that information!

I directly stated that when you delete a file in such a way as to avoid the recycle bin, you are basically just removing it's location data from the file allocation table. The OS just reads from this table, but the table isn't actually a part of the OS. That's why you can install another OS and it can still read those files. And I went into extreme detail onto how the file is only really unrecoverable, by normal means, when it is overwritten, however a file can actually be overwritten a few times and the original data will still be there. Ignore the clusters for a second (which is accurate, to a point) and remember the physical process going on. I've actually recovered lost partitions even when a new one has been created and files written to it, because there is a faint bit of magnetism there that can be detected if the HD is capable of picking it up and set in the right mode to look for that.

To get rid of that faint bit, you rewrite over and over again to that sector until that faint trace is eliminated. There are special programs that can do this repeated rewriting.

[Weltall]

Overwriting a file doesn't destroy it completely, since the process of writing to a hard disk is inherently an analog one. Now, overwriting the sectors that the file occupies several times will eventually get enough of it so that it's irrelevant, but the process IS analog, and therefore, there is always a trace.

Think of a cassette tape. Granted, the process is different, and less efficient, but you know at times a part of a tape can be recorded over, yet when that part is replayed, you can still hear a ghost of what was once there.

[Dark Jaguar]

Exactly.

Here is the thing, lazy I may have misunderstood your first post, but you certainly misunderstood mine, because what you said is VERY close to correct and almost exactly what I was trying to say.

Here's a quote from Howstuffworks.

A common misconception is that the data is actually removed from the hard drive (erased) when you delete a file. Any time that a file is deleted on a hard drive, it is not erased. Instead, the tiny bit of information that points to the location of the file on the hard drive is erased. This pointer, along with other pointers for every folder and file on the hard drive, is saved in a section near the beginning of the hard drive and is used by the operating system to compile the directory tree structure. By erasing the pointer file, the actual file becomes invisible to the operating system. Eventually, the hard drive will write new data over the area where the old file is located.

There are several utilities that you can find on the Internet that allow you to recover "deleted" files. What these utilities do is search for data on the hard drive that does not have corresponding pointer information and present you with a list of these files. Your chances of fully recovering a file diminish the longer you wait after you deleted the file since the probability that the file has been overwritten increases. Sometimes you can recover portions of a file that has not been completely overwritten.

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/question578.htm

This makes it all very clear. However, I must add to that what Weltall just said. That is very accurate. The thing is, it can eventually be fully deleted, it'll just take a lot of overwriting. The only real important thing is to get the trace that is left so low that the hard drive just can't detect it any more. That's when it takes forensic experts in crime labs to try and find a trace. It is as hard as seeing a planet next to a star from a great distance :D, and the smaller the trace the harder it is, but it can be detected to pretty low levels.

My point is simply that your first post wasn't an accurate description of what happens to a file.