Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2017 June 28

= June 28 =

Petya (malware)
I know very little about IT so please be patient with me. As you might know Petya has spread globally and hit hard in some countries. But hasn't Microsoft released patches after WannaCry hit? Hadn't the infected computers been patched properly, or is Petya exploiting a different vulnerability? --BorgQueen (talk) 07:46, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Kaspersky and others have said that its different to Petya, Kaspersky are calling it NotPetya. - X201 (talk) 07:52, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The biggest difference is that the spread is mostly e-mail based (more traditional for ransomware). It only uses the WannaCry style when spreading in your local network (WannaCry spread to everything it could find, internet or local network alike). For the spreading by e-mail it apparently uses some vulnerabilities in Office products. Most people seem to agree that it is either a Petya variant, or a new virus that liberally took a large part of petya and reused it. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 08:36, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Microsoft actually released patches for the exploit used by Wannacry befor it started to infect computers. So that was not Microsofts fault but the fault of users who did not update their Operatingsystem. However Microsoft's update system had and still has some faults (like endless update loop) that force users to disable the automatic update and then keep their Operatingsystem up to date manually. Ofcourse many fail to do so, simply because they forget to check every month at "Patch Tuesday". And thus so many computers became easy prey. --Kharon (talk) 12:41, 28 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Actually before Wannacry Microsoft hadn't publicly release patches for unsupported operating systems like XP. These were available, but only to customers who paid for continuing support. That said, most affected operating systems were supported versions of Windows which had public patches available. Nil Einne (talk) 14:50, 28 June 2017 (UTC)

Shared email
When services people from large companies send me an email, sometimes it's from a shared address like sales@company.com. Let's say Bob emails me from sales@company.com, and I quote his message in my reply to sales@company.com. Bob is one among hundreds of sales people at his company, when Bob checks his email, does he see every email addressed to sales@company.com? Or are the emails somehow automatically sorted to arrive at the right recipient? In this case the quoted message could help the sorting process, but I could have easily just written an email "from scratch" to Bob, saying "Hey Bob, here's the info you wanted", and directed it at sales@company.com, in which case there's little information to help proper sorting (there could be 10 Bobs at this company). Scala Cats (talk) 20:14, 28 June 2017 (UTC)


 * It probably won't get through to him. Actually, if you try it, you may very well find it is "returned as undeliverable", since that address does not accept mail.  I find it incredibly annoying when they send me emails like this, making it impossible to maintain a conversation with one person.  They have the philosophy that any salesperson can answer your Q's, but this really isn't so, as many Q's require follow-ups.  I also find the salespeople don't really care much if their answer is any good, if they know they will never talk to you again. StuRat (talk) 21:55, 28 June 2017 (UTC)


 * It depends very much on the configuration of company.com's email system. In a small company, sales@ may simply be an alias for a single person, or for a distribution list, or it may be a shared account that all the sales staff have on their email client.  In a larger enterprise (or an organisation that does a lot of email) it may go to a customer relationship management system which can route it to any number of complex groups of individuals or to a web system where it's dealt with by whomever is assigned email-wrangler duties at that time.  If you explicitly reply to an email from Bob, your email client will add an RFC 2822 in-reply-to header field, with a Message-ID connecting your reply back to the original email from Bob. The CRM at company.com may chose to use this to preferentially route the email back to Bob, on the basis that he's the best person to deal with it. At worst it should be able to give the person answering the context of the email (Bob's original email and hopefully - if the references field is also set - the whole thread) allowing them to pick up where Bob left off. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 22:34, 28 June 2017 (UTC)


 * The most simple way is, to have the mail server copy all incoming mails to an backup address to cover handling failures. Then have the users from sales department get the new mails. Retrieving mails, the first gets them all. Have the server protocol over the pop3 requests. For larger companies, use a ticket system or crm system which retrieves the mails and does the protocol and automatic sorting jobs. -- Hans Haase (有问题吗) 08:24, 1 July 2017 (UTC)