how dangerous could be an application/octet-stream attachment ?

['chris']

hi

what is and how dangerous could be an application/octet-stream attachment ?

should I block this kind of attachment at the firewall ?

regards
chris

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

The answer here is:

It depends.

If I wrote it, it could range from malfunctioning to accidentally dangerous.

The issue here is the rouce of the attachment. If i send you a binary file, say and .exe it will probably be encoded that way.

Since I'm a nice guy it probably won't hurt anything.

Because of their use by malicous folks, .zip files have been blocked at our symantec firwall at work. I know of know way of doing that with the standard Linux firewall.

You can go out and get a tool that plugs into sendmail and scans attachments and strips them out of the email.

If you look at an actual email, with an attachment, say in /var/mail/username a binary attachment is just going to be a bunch of unreadable characters. Its possible to write a little job that would find binary attachments and replace them with a notice saying the file was stripped out.

Its probably a while read -r rr do done type loop.

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