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SoBig: Worst is Yet to Come
bl8n8r writes "Experts say when vacationers get back to work
Monday, Inboxes will unleash the worms worst attacks.
Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems.
"
Our computers aren't getting infected: between virus scan, ZoneAlarm, ancient e-mail client and knowing not to open the stupid attachments, we've not gotten infected.
.procmailrc file, put :0 B /dev/null
But >1000 100K e-mails per day to a single address were swamping our ability to do anything but download and delete.
It took two days of querying tech support at my ISP before they'd admit that procmail would work, and a quickie recipe dumps all the infected files. Yay. I should have just done it without checking tech support, for all they helped.
This was listed in a previous thread, but it's worth repeating:
In a
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr)"
This deletes any message with a pif, exe or scr attachment.
I'll get more sophisticated later once I learn more about procmail, but for now, this does the job, without having to worry about SHELL and PATH settings.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Design for Use, not Construction!
If you're a company and it's going to cost you the money to clean worms, get a mail scanner. We haven't been infected with a single email worm for as long as I've been here at the company. (2 years) and we have 1400 users. I think a kink in the budget for scanmail once was a kickass investment in that we have been immune to every single worm (we actually patched everyone in time for the d-com worm as well, so we didn't get that one) If you're going to use windows, get a mail scanner, and deploy your patches via Group Policy before you hear about the exploits. And no, we don't have windows automatic updates enabled either, that's definately not the answer to anyone's problems, at least not in the corporate world. It may be good for people at home, unless they have dialup, then they're f'd, and shouldn't be trusting their computers to microsoft software. May I suggest a preventative approach: NTBUGTRAQ.com has a nice mailing list that seems to keep at least a few days ahead of the exploits. Russ Cooper has saved us more than once.
Speak for yourself.
According to a swedish newspaper (I'm sure others run the story as well by now), anti-virus programmers have now finally cracked the 20 IP addresses SoBig will get its updates from this weekend. It's now a race against time to shut those IP addresses down. The IP addresses are located in USA and Canada.
The reason it took this long to get the IP addresses were because they were heavily encrypted in the code and they couldn't to the usual "dump memory" trick when the virus was active since the IP addresses were only stored in memory just when they were needed, then the memory was freed.
The anti-virus guys at F-Secure don't know what will happen if they don't shut down the 20 addresses in time, only that something might happen if they don't take down all addresses.
Unusually clever actually, since I usually find viruses to be rather poorly coded and much like a hack job, like the Blaster virus that shouldn't have crashed the Windows computers much more efficiently go unnoticed. Anti-virus developers have also noticed this about SoBig and it is not very exhibitionistic either, like viruses usually are. These signs suggest that it's a more professional work than usual.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!