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Anti-Virus Companies: Tenacious Spammers
jaroslav writes "There is a great article over at Attrition about the problem of anti-virus related spam. I don't know if we should all start reporting this to the government, but telling the companies themselves that this should stop might get some results."
A lot of clients in my department regularly ask me if they have a virus when they receive these mail gateway auto-replies. I came up with a good analogy that helps even the most technophobic user understand what's going on:
If I send a letter to George Bush using Saddam Hussein for the return address, the president will not believe that the letter is really from Iraq! Why? (other than Saddam being captured?) The postmark on the envelope will say Pullman, Wa!
Similarly, if the mail server looked at the address that actually sent the virus, it would see something like aol.com or texas-telecom.net. Instead, these mail servers just blindly believe that the virus was really sent from Client-A@wsu.edu. (I insert the client's actual email address here... that helps grab their attention if their mind was already wandering...)
Not three hours after this comment, someone mailed this to Declan's Politech list, a cheat sheet for computer illeterate journalists angling for something to stay more relevant than the typewriters they still swear by. And then the very next day, we see three different articles with variations on this very topic. Five bucks says the next issue of eWeek borrows in their next issue as well.
Yes, as always, none of the stories credited Politech, though the names of the authors who borrow liberally are always the same. And Politech didn't credit Slashdot, where the Politech submitters borrow a full half of their stories with equal disregard for journalistic integrity. Indeed, the only time Politech credits Slashdot is when they believe Slash has said something stupid. These reporters are hooked on the easy source of stories, yet trash it publicly for fear others will find the tool that's kept them from having to do actual reporting anymore.
I may be here to take Linux away from you, but you can't argue that I don't give something back. You hate me. But you love me too, and you hate that as well. Think of it, you see me just the way others see Slashdot.
If you'd like to track Politech's ongoing plagiarism of Slashdot, jump on their free mailing list and have a laugh. Watch the submissions. Watch each story jump from Slash to Politech (search the comments after each new Politech post and you'll find the original +4 or +5 comment 4 times in 5), then check the NY Times, Barron's, and Ziff Davis Publishing for the same authors publishing borrowed stories the very next issue. They do it like clockwork, because these "tech" journalists don't realize that we're on the internet too.
~Darl
I totally agree, they AV co's need to shape up their act. It's a weird situation, do they really want to be THAT effective to really stop viruses, or will they be like Chinese on piracy and put up a show.
Best Community for Gaming and Gadgets!
At my last job at a public uni, obviously any and all worms and viruses slammed us hard. It was soon apparent to make support calls more mangeable as well as the lessen the pure amount of crap on the network that we had to configure our mail server virus package to send those announcement "you have or were sent an infection" messages to /dev/null. Some users might not get the warning they needed I suppose but quickly one message would turn into thousands just for one infected user. To the bit bucket with them! It helps.
"What we do in life echoes in eternity." Maximus Decimus Meridius
Steps to stop viruses:
1) At the end of every one of these viruses, just add fdisk. 2) Very quickly, there will be no more unprotected computers!
3) ???
4) Profit by shorting MSFT!
I am also quite bothered by these virus blocker programs mailing the from line when they know it is fake.
However, the truth is they know what sort of virus they have detected, and they can know whether the virus/worm in question forges the fromline or not. If they know it forges the from line, they should not send the mail back. If they know the program does NOT forge the from line, however, it is not unreasonable to send back the bounce, though for best appearances, it should not look like an ad.
If a program on my machine is sending out worms, I want to know about it. The antivirus software should be able to tell the difference.
But isn't a lot of spam generated by "lead companies".. For example, in those mortgage spams you get, the spamming company gets paid for leads to possible mortgages, not for the actual spam itself. They "lead" company is simply using spam as a method to solicit leads. Is the same applied to AV software? Sell the AV company a lead, get X% of the profit?
No kidding. I used to pass the emails along to the end users. Not any more. After this last worm (MyDoom), I became fed up with having to explain to the users why they were receiving the emails. As the parent poster did, I just throw them away. Problem solved. As for the people who allow their AV gateways to send back auto responses, they should be shot. Every time I receive one of those emails from postmaster@somewhere, I fire back a nasty email tell them to cut it out.
Occasionally I will send a nastygram to the support or abuse department of the system using the stupid virus protection. Usually they can't figure out why I'm annoyed that they told me I'm infected with a virus ... the concept that a virus can forge a FROM escapes their air-filled heads.
The author of this article seems to think that the AV companies are the one to blame for this. In fact, every AV product I've ever worked with at the mail server level has allowed you to turn this functionality off. Any decent mail server admin should be doing this themselves. It's the same kind of ignorance and stupidity that allows 3 year old exploits to continue to propagate.
"If I send a letter to George Bush using Saddam Hussein for the return address, the president will not believe that the letter is really from Iraq!"
You sure about that?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
When Blaster was going around, I decided I wanted a new email alias on my campus's email system. I chose just my first name, and to my surprise, it gave it to me.
As soon as it was set up, I started getting 50-100 messages from other servers saying that my address was spewing out viruses. Of course, this is impossible, seeing as my computer never even knew that I had this alias. Yet, I kept getting it time and time again.
The problem was, I couldn't delete the alias, and I ended up with hundreds of these messages per day. Incredibly frustrating. They must know that it serves no purpose.
Why don't we all just turn this "feature" of replying to the virus-laden email off? I do the administration of our anti-virus software on the network (Symantec Corporate Ed.), and I just turn that crap off...it's a very simple thing to do. I can't speak for the other anti-virus software, but I would assume you could also turn off email replies in them as well. We ought to be bitching to the network admins, and not to the government.
Certainly whoever sets up a server and leaves this enabled is stupid or careless, but I think the companies have some responsibility too. The option should at least be disabled by default. Enabling it should cause some sort of warning. Better yet it shouldn't be there. Why put such a dangerous feature in a program?
I work at a helpdesk, so I've spent the last couple days repeating how from headers can be forged, ect, ect to users... so I agree with the frustration and do want it to stop.
At the same time, if I unknowingly sent an important document that had a virus and was not recieved, I would want to know. Years ago I remember sending a resume that was infected with a word macro virus - I was glad that I got a bounceback message, since a)I knew I had a virus and b)I knew the place didn't get my resume.
I have blog like everyone else
Let's face it, these people all have a vested interest in making sure that viruses are not eliminated.
In the last Slashdot story about the Mydoom worm, a Computerworld article quoted the damning evidence directly from the horse's mouth:
No one has yet reported an infection by Mydoom.B, said David Perry, global director of education at Cupertino, Calif.-based antivirus vendor Trend Micro Inc. "If 100 people in the world had been infected, we would know," he said. "In fact, almost all of the viruses that have ever been detected never infected anybody ever. We say that there are about 77,000 known viruses, but only about 900 of them have ever infected anyone."
Huh? Pardon me? If they never infected anyone, then what makes them viruses? How were they detected if they never infected anyone - from the original first seeds by the viruswriters themselves? Then why in the hell haven't they tracked the virus writers down? Are these inventions of the AV companies that never existed outside of the AV companies' labs? Only 900 out of 77,000 ever infected anyone - isn't the virus problem then vastly overrated?
Given the above statement and the quite legitimate complaint that started this thread in the first place, I really think everyone should question the AV companies' role in the virus situation.
I wonder if we (as a community) should draft an RFC that governs such things as naming conventions and the like. perhaps define all types of viruses give them a designation as to what platform and what they do. The names would sort of be a mixture of all the major vendors.
.A .B .C etc, and a convention for payload style. Mydoom was a mass mailer that also was meant for use in a DDOS.
Something like
$PLATFORM/$VIRUS.$VERSION@$PAYLOAD-STYLE So you'd need a simpl draft coming up with a platform name Win32 for 32-bit windows Mac for mac's yadda yadda, a Virus naming convention so that everyone would be able to tell from looking at the virus as to what it's name should be, $version
So perhaps mydoom should be
Win32/Mydoom.A@MM@DD
-or-
Win32/Happy99.a@M
just thoughts and ideas, what's everyone else think?
As well as defining in the RFC that, if a worm is known to spoof the From: field then skip the auto-reponder notice altogether.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I believe in a little axiom that says
I'm only going by my experience in anti-virus software, but lets look at it this way:
1) Anti-virus software is on the desktop machine to prevent infection
2) Soon viruses are getting in via email. Anti-virus software writers decide to target the enterprise (where the real money is) and where it makes most logical sense to block viruses now.
3) Some programmer comes up with the idea "Hey! Wouldn't it be great if our software automatically emailed the person who sent the virus in the first place? After all, its 1997 and the only way to get a virus is via a word or excel document attached to the email." The product development approved, not only because education is a huge tool in stopping viruses, but a little (I stress a little) free advertising couldn't hurt.
4) Microsoft introduces new features and more sophisticated viruses are introduced.
5) The option stays on and is set by default because no one re-evaluates it and its just that way.
6) Some cracker gets an ingenious idea to use the feature against itself and cause more harm than good. The feature is exploited to send out thousands of emails per server, which the original designers never intended.
7) Anti-virus writers don't pay attention because you can just turn it off and its not important to them any more. It's the admin's job to know to turn this off. They may tell some people, and they may default it to off in the next version, but its not high on the list.
And even still, you can't just tell someone they are stupid for coding it this way or for not turning it off. Until recently, this option made "Never attribute any action to malice when you can attribute it to stupidity or ignorance."sense. Tell the infected user of their problem so cut down on the spread of virii. Now, as in the biological world, the virus writers figured out how to use a portion of the "immune system" against itself.
It's just the way things happen. I write a virus, you write a counter measure, I write a way to get around it. What's missing here is an email illustrating that the intent of sending out all these emails was deliberate on the part of anti virus writers. The article is assuming intent for no other reason than to scare people. Again, "Never attribute any action to malice when you can attribute it to stupidity or ignorance."
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
And on the way out, pounding "I AM AN E-MAIL SPAMMER" signs on their front lawn?
C'mon, admit it. That would feel really good.
Stefan
Personally, I'd be pissed at your parents for naming you "postmaster".
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?