Cybercrooks breed SELF-CLONING MUTANT that STEALS your BANK DETAILS

Re: Worm-like information stealing banking Trojan

"If open wasn't the same as execute then email attachments wouldn't be dangerous."

Or if email clients were configured by default to delete all executable/high risk attachments, and to have easily changed rules to adjust that as required.

In a corporate world there's a lot more control of such things, in the personal world email clients have stagnated for years, with rudimentary filtering that is neither enabled by default, not lends itself to managing either attachments or embedded links and objects.

I suppose the lack of investment in email clients is yet another casualty of Microsoft's "give it away free" policies of prior years. The sooner that company curls up and dies the better.