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Microsoft Virus Spam: SoBig.F
If you're being barraged with Microsoft virus spam emails today, this story notes that it's a flare-up of an older Microsoft virus in a new, improved form. Yay for trustworthy computing.
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Here in Norway it seems as "everyone" has got SoBig.F or is getting annoyed with fake emails from someone who has it.
This virus is just a little variation of an older virus, but it differed enough from the older iterations so that anti virus software didn't detect it.
The virus provider Norman reckons that a big organization in Norway has been hit early and that this caused the big numbers here: Norway stands for 36% of the outbreaks of this virus in the world, which is exceptional when you know that only 4 million people live here.
We certainly got hammered for a good part of today from a university down south who shall remain anonymous. Contacted their IT/infrastructure department and was told that one of their mail servers got used as a relay, and nobody found out about it until a few hours ago. If I were them I would have shut down their MTA and flushed the queue a long time ago, but that's just me...
I just received one of these today from webmaster@match.com. But I received it on my Hotmail account.
And seeing how Hotmail proudly proclaims on every message:
"Notice: Attachments are automatically scanned for viruses using McAfee Security"
we'll be getting a lot of hotmail users opening it to take a peak
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
I'm not seeing very many messages with SOBIG, as them get filtered at the mail server.
However, the large number of "Your message to xyz@zyx.com contained a virus" is filling my mail spool faster than any spammer. Seems one of my email addresses is a popular one to spoof.
CALL TO ADMINS: Please turn off viral notifications to outside addresses. These days most of the envelope addresses are spoofed, you're not doing any good leaving the notification in place.
And I thought joe-jobbing was bad.
Anything is possible given time and money.
I wish Mozilla Mail had some setting for this too. It's statistical filtering is great after it's been trained, but it did me no good this morning. By the time I got to work, my inbox had over 5000 new messages. Sure, it's trained now, but I spent over an hour this morning deleting them since I didn't want to delete legit mail too.
:)
So how did I get 5000 new messages? I know I'm not in the address books of that many people who got infected, so this one must be doing dictionary addressing as well as address book addressing. Since my email address is of the format [first initial][lastname]@[a large company].com, and my last name is very common, I got pummelled. Maybe I should switch to a more obscure address.
OTOH, we could replace the Bill-as-Stephen-Hawking with the bug icon, and no-one would care ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Built in obsolescence? Maybe the writer always wants you to have the latest version or something. This also reminds me of the recent musings of a software company we love to hate ;-)