Yahoo Email Filter Isnt Quite Right...

[FthrJACK]

Problems with Yahoo's security software have resulted in some customer's emails being translated into nonsense. The company uses a filtering system to check messages sent to users of of its free web based email service. but a problem has been found in the filter. The filter attempts to avert cyber attacks by changing words inside HTML email attachments that could form part of harmfull programs. These programs, which could just be a few lines of text in a HTML email, can steal passwords or other personal information.

However the filter has been changing words in innocent documents.

Scott morris, international PR manager at yahoo said

To ensure the highest level of security for our users, yahoo employs automated software to protect our users from potential cross scripting violations.

Morris wouldnt comment on the softwares tendancy to swap some words with ones of no proper meaning, for example, "medieval" becomes "medireview".

Many yahoo users have been duped by the word changes, or simply not noticed them. type "medireview" into google and you find over 1200 web pages containing the nonsense word - mostly included in essays and articlews on history and guides to places.

the mistake gets onto web pages when people pass html documents around and then simply copy and paste the text from the email into a site.

other affected words include:

"mocha" which becomes "expresso" and "evaluate" which became "reviewuate" Denis Zenkin head of comunications at anti virus company Kaspersky Labs said:

Java script filtering will never get rid of email viruses that use attachments and security vulnerabilities - this is not a weapon to solve the problem

[LouCypher]

I use Yahoo's filters to put all HTML messages in their own folder upon receipt. I never read any of them, since they're all SPAM (or Outlook users).