Slashdot Mirror
Virus Scanner Auto-Replies - A Good Thing or Obsolete?
Moryath writes "Used to be, everyone put an auto-responder in their email server's virus scanner. That way, some dingus sends in a virus, you're protected, and they get notified so they scan and fix their system. Of course, all these stupid things ever do is reply to the From: field, and possibly to Abuse@domain, webmaster@domain, etc... as well. Enter viruses like Sobig. We've had them for years in various forms, they spoof the From: field with another email from another victim's contact book, and all of a sudden random people are getting bounces of emails they've never sent. I have actually gotten more bounces today than actual Sobig attachments. So what does the Slashdot crowd think? Is it time for the people running these mail servers to take down those autoresponders? Are they guilty for part of the damage things like SoBig have caused, since their ill-configured mail servers are doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling the amount of traffic one Sobig infection produces?"
To those who admin Windows networks... Please put an exit filter for TCP port 25 on your firewall so only your mail server can send SMTP and not infected workstations.
I've been getting tons of bounces and antivirus messages that are a result of someone else with my e-mail address having the virus. Of course, the whole e-mail infrastructure is obsolete: What do you mean someone else can easily send an e-mail as me! Perhaps if they fixed that however antivirus messages would once again be useful. Could someone with modpoints please mod up my post two posts earlier that erroneously got modded 'Troll'?