Sun, 07 Sep 2003
Crazy ...
I'm successfully filtering out all the incoming copies of the
Sobig.F virus before they hit my inbox.
But since I last zeroed out my virus trap, 80 hours ago, I
have received 73Mb of virus payloads. That's nearly 1Mb per
hour, and the rate is accelerating -- it was only about 6Mb
in the first day, but it's now tending towards 1Mb/hour.
This has got to be sucking up a good chunk of the total
email bandwidth of the internet.
UPDATE: sixteen hours have passed, and my virus trap
is now up to 117Mb. That's 3.5Mb of viral crap per hour, or
about the bandwidth of a 14.4K modem dialup. This is a worse
shit-storm than the original Sobig.F attack a couple of weeks
ago. I'm off to the pub tonight (it being Feorag's birthday)
and I'll be soliciting suggestions for how best to deal with
the asshole responsible. A free pint will be won by the most creative
but appropriate torture ...
As a side-note: because of a distributed denial-of-service
attack that suspiciously coincided with the first Sobig.F
attacks, Osirusoft (one of the main spam relay blacklists)
went offline a couple of days ago. Before they went offline
their administrator, in what appears to be a fit of pique,
set the SPEWS blacklist to blacklist the entire internet.
If you use SpamAssassin, please update your
configuration so as not to use Osirusoft as a blacklist --
otherwise you won't get any email from me, or a hell of a lot
of other people, either. (More information on Slashdot
and elsewhere.) It has been speculated that the Sobig series
are being developed by spammers in order to turn infected machines into
relay zombies ... it's at times like this that I realise I'm
really living in the 21st century and I wish it would go
away.
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posted at: 18:48 | path: /virus | permanent link to this entry
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