 One protection against this is to open it with an archive manager instead of executing it (losing the minor advantage of self-extraction); the archive manager will either report the file as not an archive or will show the underlying metadata of the executable file - a strong indication that the file is not actually a self-extracting archive.Additionally, some systems for distributing files do not accept executable files in order to prevent the transmission of malicious programs.These systems disallow self-extracting archive files unless they are cumbersomely renamed by the sender to, say, somefiles.exx, and later renamed back again by the recipient.