Sometimes spammers make me sicker than usual, and this Christmas was no exception. As Computerworld reported, spammers gave their best to all computer users all over America with a very special Christmas greeting: 'Merry Christmas to our hero sons and daughters' spam e-mail, hiding a vicious Trojan ready to be installed:

"In an e-mail warning, iDefense said that the e-mail with the subject "Merry Christmas to our hero sons and daughters!" and the attachment Christmas+Blessing-4.ppt "silently installs a backdoor Trojan horse on vulnerable computers." This version of the Hupigon (sometimes also called Hupigeon) Trojan installs two files on a compromised system, according to Ken Dunham, director of iDefense's Rapid Respones Team: msupdate.dll (18,507 bytes) and sdfsc.dll (3 bytes)"

This festive season you have many things to be grateful for, especially if you opened the attachment in the 'Marry Christmas' e-mail, so I guess you are writing a special Thank You note to the Microsoft team thanking them for making bulletproof and secure software such as PowerPoint.

Did I forget to mention that attachments in unsolicited e-mails should not be opened? My geek friend says that even the most sophisticated anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall programs can't compete with human stupidity.