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Trend Micro Quarantines Letter P

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the unintended-behaviors dept.

kkenedy writes "I thought this was the funniest thing I have read in a long time: CRN reports that a bug in an update to one of Trend Micro's security products inadvertently blocks all incoming e-mail containing the letter P." Makes me glad I don't use it, else I wouldn't get any mail, purely on the basis of my surname.

7 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. kudos by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    While strange this didn't get picked up before being released (seems they need to adjust their test samples).

    Kudos to them for fixing it within an hour and a half, and notifying registered clients and resellers.

  2. Wachovia/1st Union blocks email with "hi" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wachovia has been blocking ALL email with "hi" in the title for almost 2 years now with no notice of what the problem is, just "rejected due to policy". But they do NOT view it as a problem even though they have around 25,000-30,000 employees. If only 1% are entitled "hi" and each gets maybe 10 emails a day, that is 2500-3000 emails blocked per day with no notice.

    Nice service from a BANK. Their tech department is pretty stupid.

    1. Re:Wachovia/1st Union blocks email with "hi" by octalgirl · · Score: 3, Informative


      Sounds like that's left over from a mass mailer virus that was going around a couple of years back. It took everyone in the address book and added 'Hi' to the subject line so ppl would think it was from a friend. That's gone by though and very easily picked up from any virus detection package. Sounds like your net admin needs to get back in there and tweak the filter settings.

  3. As someone who actually _uses_ eManager... by nbvb · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, the product has the potential for big-brother type thing (filtering mail, etc...) but we don't use it for any of that.

    #1) We use it along with Viruswall to block incoming viruses (It's a proxy that sits in front of Sendmail for us....) Works really well; we haven't had a virus outbreak in 2+ years. (Lousy Outlook!)

    #2) We use it to filter out Spam. I don't get _any_ Spam at my work address. At all. Very impressive if you ask me!

    Viruswall & eManager are pretty ugly pieces of code, but they do the job. We don't get viruses and don't get Spam, and that's why we use it. :)

    Having said that, this stop-the-P thing is a mess. I just checked our rulefiles, and we jumped from rulefile 914 to 920..... glad to see that ;)

    --DM

    1. Re:As someone who actually _uses_ eManager... by Kphrak · · Score: 2, Informative

      The virus part is fine...but eManager is one of the worst spam products ever invented. No scoring, so mail either goes through or gets blocked without any in-betweens. The out-of-the-box rules must have been written by Jonathan Edwards (for those not up on their history, he was a famous Puritan preacher). There's no HTML cleaning ability; the only way to keep nasty javascripts away is to block javascript (which causes every employee to squawk because they lose all their newsletters). When we use the "auto-update" antispam feature that this article's about, we got a 45% false positive rate. The slightest change (numbers substituted for letters, misspellings, etc) invalidates a setting and lets spam through; it's got to match exactly.

      I've used eManager for two years and am working to get rid of it. Hell, even thinking about eManager will probably block your legit mail and let in the spam.

      --

      There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
  4. Not just "P" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    I fall into one of those "low double digit customers".... and even blank emails were getting stripped. As the filter also checks embedded code (RTF, HTML, etc)... even a blank email's gonna have a P in it somewhere... Only exception here was OWA and some Mac users where messages seemingly used plain text for the most part. 2 hour window of all mail gone into the ether. Fun

  5. Re:And...? Some Perspective Please! by nautical9 · · Score: 3, Informative
    Agreed - a minor bug that was fixed promptly.

    I'd also like to point out that Trend Micro offers a great free online virus scanner that comes in very handy when you get a call from a friend/relative who's having computer problems. No need to haul over and install your own virus scanner (which is undoubtedly against said virus scanner's EULA anyway) just to find out if they're infected. I can't remember if it actually CLEANS the viruses it finds, but manually removing most viruses isn't all that tough once you know what you're looking for.

    The HouseCall product has also spotted viruses that Norton did not.