Sometimes, I received JPG pictures by mail whose titles contain 6 white spaces instead of one. For instance: “town near the river”. Avast doesn’t really appreciate it and displays a “Suspicious message” window mentioning a “suspicious whitespace sequence” ???
Since I don’t think the picture sender intentionnaly inserted white spaces in his picture title (it happens regularly with always 6 white spaces instead of 1), does someone know if a virus could do that ? I tried to make research on google for that but I didn’t find anything. These pictures were stored on an iPaq before being sent to me. This behavior is recent. No problem before.
Thanks for your help.
The message is (a bit) suspicious because some viruses use the following trick: they’ve an attachment called e.g.
Info.txt .exe
Because the window in which the names are displayed has a size limitation, it’s quite likely that the .exe extension will not be displayed (will be clipped), making the user think that it’s a TXT file, instead of an EXEcutable.
If you want, you can turn off the whitespace checking but in 99.9% of cases you shouldn’t really see any (legal) attachments with names like that…
Thanks a lot for your answers.
Actually, I scanned my disk and found no particular viruses.
I am really happy to understand why Avast was so suspicious. But the attached files with names with spaces were no exe (pcw or most often jpg). So I don’t really know the reason of these additional spaces. Maybe a mailer bug. But the pocket PC (iPaq) where the original files were stored before being mailed to me, had been infected previously by a virus called “HTML.redolf.A”. I mean the storage card contained files infected by this virus. The infected files were supposed to be eradicated. But I don’t really think there is a link…
