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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.
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So far this week, I've received only seven actual copies of W32/Sobig. However, the number of messages from mailer-daemons and mail server virus scanners has exceeded this by a factor of ten. Some of these rejection messages actually include a copy of the infected .PIF file.
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
At best, this is collateral damage. At worst, these rejection messages are actually advertising the IP addresses of infected systems. Should a virus drop a back door payload, this would multiply the damage.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field.
The situation is even worse than that: Most (all?) of the virus scanners sending me autoreplies correctly identified the virus as being Sobig -- which always uses spoofed source addresses.
Sending autoreplies is sometimes useful, but these scanners should at very least have a table which tells them, for each virus, whether an autoreply should be sent (ie, a table which specifies if a virus uses spoofed source addresses).
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems rather than the destruction of files or the opening of files to outsiders on the Internet, which can be problems with many computer viruses. Pescatore said that the cost of both technical support personnel and lost productivity by the computers' users can range from $500 to $1,000 per infected machine.
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And who is Marc Sunner? he's the CTO of MessageLabs. And what does MessageLabs do, you ask? see for yourself, from the main page at messagelabs.com:
Email security today is a global issue which pervades whole organizations. Viruses, spam, pornographic material and other harmful or unwanted content represent a serious risk to your company. To combat these all too real threats, you need a total, proven and effective solution. Only MessageLabs can assure you of complete peace of mind from complete email security
$500 to $1000 to clean up each infected machine? Right, whatever Marc. And it's obvious you don't have *any* interest in propagating that baloney too. (on second thought, if you hire me to clean your machines, I'll do 5% discount off that price).
Another fine impartial article reposted by Slashdot. (By the way, the word you're looking for is "advertising")
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
What I find discouraging is that the lemmings are falling for it despite this being The Week of Teh Worm.
All the hopeful articles that have sited users claiming a new awareness of the risk of worms and virii seem to be pipe dreams.
Dumb users are dumb users and the more infectuous and persistant the virus, the more networks are going to get hammered. Why oh why aren't all pif, scr, exe, com, and vbs attachments just blocked by the MDA. There is no good reason for allowing an end user the huge complexity of choosing whether or not to click on the latest attachment that's come to them from "the internet".
If the lemmings are getting suckered this week... when every news medium is blathering on about viruses worming their way through nuclear reactors and motor vehicle registration offices, what hope is there for when the attention has settled?