@*#&$(@!!! email worms

[solarbird]

After 15-odd more copies of that goddamn email worm during the day yesterday, I got another 40+ copies last night. The radio said that 70% of mail sent over the internet yesterday was this same #64&@*$^!!! email worm. Oooh, I just want to kill somebody. Plus: who the !@*&#$!! still clicks on attachments from strangers? What is wrong with these people?

Comments

[gazerwolf.livejournal.com]

Morons who have decided that they don't want to spend the extra second to click on attachments and have set things up to process attachments automatically.

It's probably aggravated by the morons who add anyone who sends them mail to thier address book...so they get the worm from someone and the worm was using your address and they added it to thier address book and it uses your address to send out from there...sigh...

hanging is too good for the worm makers.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

I don't know the details of this particular one, but one reason for the success of recent email viruses is that the attachments DON'T always come from strangers - there's a chance that they may come from a *friend*. Some of the messages are generic enough to be convincing, at least if you have barely literate friends.

Also, many such viruses include OE/Outlook exploits that mean their attachments will run automatically if you are using older, unpatched IE versions.

Overall though I think the answer is just that there it doesn't need too many stupid people for a virus to propogate, if it sends *enough* irritating emails.

I've got to say it is annoying though. I got 270 spams today (normally it's only about 150) and I expect many of those are down to this virus, haven't checked.

Most of the messages that got through were actually bounces and "OH NO! YOU HAVE A VIRUS!" warnings, due to this virus trying to send itself 'from' one of my addresses, incidentally one that I never use but is on the web somewhere...

BTW if you are still manually deleting spams/viruses I very strongly recommend SpamAssassin, if you can install that on your system (there's an easy POP3 proxy for Windows, but IIRC you use Linux). It's not perfect but deleting 20 messages is a lot less unfun than deleting 270. (I have it set to just automatically delete anything it detects, but with a fairly high threshold.)

[solarbird]

Yeah, we've got SpamAssassin, it just hasn't figured this one out yet.

[annathepiper]

Spamassassin seems to have gotten the clue for me, finally, after I fed it enough of the worm mails for it to get a clue. But I have also had a sharp decline in number received anyway, yay!

[cafiorello.livejournal.com]

Well, the world has a lot more technical incompetents online these days, too. My MIL has trashed I don't know how many computers because she'll not only open attachments from random strangers, she'll install anything she's sent to see if it's cool. Keith has given her *very* explicit directions this time. We'll see how that works.

On the good side, I found out the name of everyone at Temple who has me in their address book. ;)
Cathy