Another day, another windows virus
Flooding my bloody inbox.. I've gotten couple dozen copies of the damn thing before I put a stop to it by blocking it at the server level. It doesn't affect my pc, since I don't use windows, but it does affect my server resources, time and sanity (yes, it takes time to hit the delete button).
Postfix rocks.. and Steve has a tip on how to block the virus if you're using it.
Linux users may laugh at windows users.. but in reality we're all equally affected by these problems and insecurities. Maybe it's time to start attacking the real problem.. the idiots who write these things. You want to prove that windows is insecure? Give up.. it's been done.. thousands times over. It won't make your pathetic little life any fuller and it won't get you laid, it will just annoy the hell out of people like me. In other words, the people you really want on your side.
Comments
I personally think we need to come down harder on those who release programs that are extremely insecure than the people who prove they are insecure. If people didn't write insecure programs, they wouldn't be able to exploit them. That really is the only solution that will work. The general users are not going to get smarter, and as long as there are vunerabilities to exploit, people will keep exploiting them.
Posted by: Techie2000 | August 19, 2003 10:25 PM
I would guess that proving an OS is insecure is at best an excuse for virus writing. Annoying people is an end in itself (just not a very good one).
Posted by: Matt | August 19, 2003 10:37 PM
Much as I would like to believe that other software is more secure, I will wait until a) 00's of 000,000's of them are out there in use and b) all the hackers are concentrating on hacking them.
Posted by: JamesR | August 20, 2003 10:22 AM
Something odd is afoot with this one... I'm getting bounce back messages that I've sent people the pif file and I haven't opened a message with it... tis very odd.
Posted by: Randy | August 20, 2003 03:11 PM
Probably being sent on your behalf. Certain variations of this week's virus are generating spoof emails instead of straight-sends. We're getting a lot of this at work.
We aren't at risk (don't allow attachments through Exchange, and Norton scans out the virus anyways), but the 10K bouncebacks we got sure were annoying.
Certainly speeding up our XWall deployment.
Posted by: Jeremy C. Wright | August 20, 2003 03:58 PM
"Maybe it's time to start attacking the real problem.. the idiots who write these things..."
And I thought you were going to complete that sentence with "... the folks in Redmond."
Like I might have.
Posted by: MS_nonfan | August 20, 2003 06:20 PM
Yeah, I've been seeing later notices that there's been a bit of "reply to" spoofing this go around... if it wasn't such an annoying thing, I'd admire the new twist on an old habit.
I agree with Kasia though, especially with this type of "virus" which is more of a trojen horse - I wouldn't blame MS for this one because it's not a hole in Windows this time... it's stupid users that open an attachment that they shouldn't - god knows users could screw up a wet dream.
Sorry - didn't mean to get on the soapbox.
Posted by: Randy | August 21, 2003 10:17 AM
I've been writing polite messages to the admins of sites doing the auto-reply crap (for a long time, not just with this most recent annoying outbreak) along the lines of, "Auto-responses on virus detection are harmful, because most email viruses these days spoof the sender anyway, so the messages only go to people who probably don't actually have the virus, causing more panic and not actually making the problem any better."
Also, The Register posted an article about that yesterday, which I think I'll include in the text of these messages, just to give me that little bit of credibility with the admins who insist that I "might have the virus anyway."
Posted by: fluffy | August 21, 2003 12:04 PM
And since HTML is being stripped out, that link to the article was lost... http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/32434.html
Posted by: fluffy | August 21, 2003 12:05 PM