Subject: Re: global warning: worms and viruses
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 30 2001 - 08:37:10 GMT
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 10:00:46AM +0100, Bernd Wahlbrinck wrote:
> 2. I was away for 2 days, and when I got back last night there were
> 217 emails in my account. 207 were from a LENNONO (JOHN LENNON)
> MAILING LIST. It seems there must be a virus who is able to get
> people on that mailing list (any mailing list??) so that they receive
> mails they never asked for. this virus must have gotten me on that
> list. about 50% of those mails contained lots of expletives from
> people like me, writing to that list and
> asking/pleading/begging/cursing to be removed.
> does anyone know about this and/or how mailing lists including the
> fish list could be protected from those criminals?
We're reasonably well protected.
First, the list rejects messages that are over 30K in size, so it
would have rejected all the virus messages you have seen and the many
dozens that I have seen.
Second, only one has come to the list, and that was from an infected
subscriber who has been a problem in the past. He has multiple
addresses, which has also been a problem in the past, but was useful
this time because his virus posting was rejected as a non-subscriber
posting. (It would have been rejected anyway because it was too big.)
Third, these are not "criminals"; the viruses (these recent ones are
actually worms, an important distinction) are sent without the
knowledge or consent of the owner of the mailer. The worm burrows
into the mailbox and propogates itself by plucking addresses either
from your address book or from your existence in the sender's web
cache (e.g., if the sender had been reading the list's archive, which
has your address in it), so the sender really isn't to blame, except
that s/he may not have the most recent antivirus definitions.
Lesson: have the most recent antivirus definitions!
Compute in good health!
--tim
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