Lousy E-mail Filters Complicating Outlook Worms 461
Mar writes "FRISK Software founder Fridrik Skulason has issued an open letter in which he blames other anti-virus companies for much of the Sobig.F network load problems: 'If mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic. This makes them a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.'"
But still less... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a lousy argument for obvious poor behavior on the part of anti-virus software. It's like saying every time the police catch a violent criminal, they should kick the ass of some random citizen. Hey, it may be annoying, but it's still less violence than you'd have if the criminal got to their target and acted violently.
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd be happy if bounces in SoBig-like cases were reduced, but I find it a weak argument to blame the worm problem on anti-virus software without giving numbers of how much bounces actually added to the problem. (Well, it's another anti-virus software producer writing this statement, so this open letter could be considered a PR statement to some extent.)
Somehow this also reminds me of those stupid Windows firewall products that by default alert you of every single stupid network packet...
Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't. Their contribution to the problem is only limited to their marketshare. Any antivirus can block the viruses - but using these idiots over better competitors results in how many *illions of extra messages? Not to mention the confusion it creates on behalf of less savvy recipients. How many people paid for tech service on their "infected" computer
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
I suggest that at the very least, users get the message that there is something going on (even it it isn't there particular machine that is affected) and, kn
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope. Because the bounce rate is simply a linear factor of (market share of idiot AV vendor) * (virus propogation rage). So if the virus goes geometric, so does the bounce rate.
We aren't talking MB of data, we're talking a couple KB per message.
Remember the total overhead of sending a message as well.
I suggest that at the very least, users get the message that ther
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Gonna have to disagree with your conclusion. When you have x^y where x is the size/impact of a single letter and y is the branching factor (average number of recipients per message) than (x+1)^
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the math's still off. If x is the so big rate, and y is the exponential propogation rate, and A is the AV copmany's market share (between 0 and 1), the rate of propogation of Sobig is x^y. The rate of propogation of bounces is A(x^y). So the propogation rate of sobig + bounces is (1+A)(x^y), not (x+1)^y. Actually, if I amended your math, it would be worse (your formula assumes that a bounce can be branched). There, it would be (x+Ax)^y. And that would be a phenomenal impact. The way you write the formula (x+1)^y, it assumes that only one bounce were ever sent. If that were the case, no one would worry. But it's not. And if you take the derivative of my amended version of your formula, which is the incremental impact per message sent, it increases exponentially too. Think about that. I can do the calculus too if you like. Either way, it's bad. At best the impact is a constant fraction of the sobig rate. At worst, they work together geometrically.
What does one do if they think they have a virus? If they are in a corporate environment, they ping the help desk (and that would be ONCE per person, regardless of the number of emails they get).
Yeah, and in a large environment of thousands of people, that's *exactly* what the help desk needs. Trust me, I know some of these people, and it's driving them nuts.
If they are a home user, they make sure they have updated virus software. If they are clueless, then they will take it somewhere and get anti-virus software installed.
And if they were already up-to-date, then they just paid money for nothing. And once they get up-to-date and know they're OK, and they keep getting messages, they learn to ignore them. So when another message comes out that they're not prepared for, they think they are.
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, your hypothetical is wrong, not what I was saying. X is the impact or cost of a single sobig email. This is how much? 600k? if for EACH sobig email X there is a "random" message saying "You sent spam" whic
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
Bouncing mail with attachments intact is unimaginably dumb.
Re:Virus autobounces are stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't care if it's growing linearly, exponentially, or factorially. Doubling it means twice as much crap for email administrators to deal with and is hardly "not all that big of a deal."
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Trojan fakes from address of 'joe@foo.com', sends email to 'sue@bar.com' with infected attachment.
2. Filter at 'bar.com' detects infected attachment, sends rejection email from 'sue@bar.com' to 'joe@foo.com'.
3. It turns out that 'joe@foo.com' is no longer a valid address. 'foo.com' mail agent sends a delivery failure email to 'sue@bar.com'.
Thus we get two pointless administrative emails generated by a single infected email.
I am seeing this happening quite commonly, by the way.
Re:But still less... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, the AV companies need to start working on an effecient mailserver (or simply hook into the existing ones), and prevent sucessful transmission of viral contents.
Because it would be on an upstream server away from the users, Virus definition files will be updated quicker, and protection will be automatic.
The problem then becomes one of localised ISP traffic only, and this can be cured by the ISP themselves. Another benfit of this, the ISP can send a single "You are infected" mail to the Account holder of the source IP.
For Unknown IP addresses - simply block relay access
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Insightful)
There are people out there that don't understand that email addresses are easy to forge. I had two people last night a church services comment about me sending them a virus. I never check email with anything except Linux at home and even at that I have virus scanning on and working to make sure.
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
<rant>
That's what utterly astonished me during the recent SoBig.F infestation. When an undelivered mail message with an attachment bounces, the mail servers return not just the subject line, or the message text, but the attachment to the putative sender.
Were the architects of the common Internet mail utilities just plain stupid? What other conclusion can possibly be drawn? Who taught these epsilon-minus lackwits to use a computer, and why? What else am I supposed to think when a mail gateway or server is designed to bounce hundreds of kilobytes worth of attached junk to someone who, by definition, already has the data (since, after all, it's not as if he or she is the one who fucking sent it the first place)? And when it's designed to do so via an untrustworthy return address courtesy of the nullwits who designed the SMTP protocol, no less?
It is WAY past time to scrap the Internet's existing email infrastructure in favor of something designed by actual engineers. What we have now is a giant, virtual Petri dish better suited for the cultivation of worms, viruses and spam than for communication between legitimate users.
</rant>
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't you go ask him:
SIMPLE MAIL TRANSFER PROTOCOL
Jonathan B. Postel
August 1982
Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, California 90291
(213) 822-1511
I'm sure many of us would love it if you met up with him and had a spirited debate about the issue very soon.
Did you ever stop to think that many of the Internet's protocols were designed when there were no fuckwits running operating systems that are a virtual "petri dish" for viruses and worms?
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Shrug) Bad engineering is bad engineering. Postel's accomplishments were legion, but in the email department, he and his colleagues dropped the ball big-time. There's just no room to defend the decisions that were made.
The minute the Internet showed signs of growing out of the obscure DARPA-funded labs where it was bo
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Informative)
SMTP lacks meaningful authentication features for the same reasons that TCP/IP lacks such features; they weren't needed at the time, and better to get something worki
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, why on earth do you send a notification to an address that is known to be forged?
The answer is simple - free advertising payed with your and my money. It is not stupidity. It is malice. An outright form of advertising a product by SPAM. I think that any Washington (or other state with antispam laws) resident should sue them for this.
Re:But still less... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Insightful)
Terrorism has INTENT. The behavior you are referring to I think may be better classified as sociopathic.
I am only offended by that comment by today's date. I'm sure I will get over it tomorrow.
Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm still getting about 200-300 "You sent a message with SoBig.F! Patch your computer immediately!" every day.
Trouble is, I'm on a Mac. I couldn't be infected with SoBig.F if I wanted to.*
Further trouble is, SoBig.F spoofs the FROM: field, so these messages invariably go to everybody except the schmuck with the infected box.
So no, these messages hurt far more than they help.
[* Pedant filter: I suppose I could buy Virtual PC or somesuch and install a vulnerable version of Windows. That'd probably do the trick.]
Re:But still less... (Score:2)
Trouble is, I'm on a Mac. I couldn't be infected with SoBig.F if I wanted to...
I'm on Linux, and I've had far more bounce messages telling me I've just sent an infected email than copies of SoBig-F, and my spam filter has caught well over 400 copies of SoBig-F now...
Al.Re:But still less... (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part of it is that the antivirus software sending these messages knows that it's SoBig.F. Thus, it should also know that the virus forges the From: header, and that it's pointless to send out the warning message to that address.
So thanks, antivirus programmers. Thanks for wasting my time instead of doing your job correctly. How long would have taken to add an extra if(){} to your code, and another boolean field to your virus database?
Re:But still less... (Score:3, Insightful)
but i guess it's just a nice feature some phb's think that is cool.
Stupid Bounce (Score:3, Redundant)
Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:5, Funny)
Or maybe I just have no friends.
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:4, Insightful)
Not just close - they meet most of the definitions of "spam" that I've heard;
They're excessive unwanted emails.
They're unsolicited bulk.
They're mass mailings from a stranger.
They're sent without consent.
They're commerical (they're an ad for the anti-virus software that sends them.)
-- this is not a
Challenge/response sucks (Score:3, Interesting)
The statement "If mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic. This makes them a part of the problem, not a part of the solution" is also what I've been saying for months. This is a condemnation of challenge/response. Challenge/response is flawed conceptually in that it assumes the return address is correct. In an age of spam (which it supposedly
Re:Yes, virus bounces suck (Score:3, Insightful)
On my main account, I got exactly 0 sobig bounces and 0 actual sobig messages. This applies for all versions of sobig. (Only the competent get access to my real address.)
On my main 'spam address' however, it got about a 10:1 ratio of bounces to sobig messages. I guess a lot of spammers got infected and since they have a
How come we even get them? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:3, Insightful)
2. Your desire to have people behave politely doesn't override the general need to have the Internet remain an open exchange of packets between peers.
3. What's an ISP? What's a customer? Should UUNet filter mail coming from their peers? Should a University filter mail coming from its own dekstops? What about labs that have their own Internet presence, but are part of the University? What about multi-homed businesses?
I get a slew of these messages, and I have to a
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:5, Interesting)
It is true that since Sobig uses its own SMTP server the ISP would have to do the monitoring via a port 25 monitor. I'm not completely sure how difficult/expensive this would be to implement on a large scale, but there's an opportunity for someone who comes up with a cheap solution. I suppose it could be part of a general IDS, but it needs to be something price-accessible to an ISP.
Larry Seltzer
Security Editor, eWEEK.com
http://security.eweek.com/
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is trivial. Allow for normal port 25 access to the ISP's email server (with the usual restrictions on volume and content) and, for external port 25 access, there's a number of possibilities:
1. Allow the client to setup a pre-determined list of specific hosts they want to connect to. This might be done using a web-based interface.
2. Only allow the first 10 hosts (per dialup connection, per DHCP lease, per hour, etc.) to be accessible via port 25. This should satisfy even power users as few need to check mail on over 10 different servers. Adjust number as appropriate.
3. Setup a proxy service which allows unlimited port 25 access. Any viruses which include their own SMTP delivery engines won't know about the proxy and will simply fail. There's no additional security risk to using your ISP's proxy than using the ISP's connection itself, as both can be logged with equal ease.
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting rid of all of them is a long-term process.
In the short term, you want to stay operational with minimal colateral damage. While emergency training will certainly help, it's almost a certainty that what needs to be done is not covered in the book. Sophisticated tools could certainly help, but it seems to me that with TCPDUMP and a pair of eyes and almost
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:2)
Unless your email is encrypted your privacy is an illusion anyway.
Re:How come we even get them? (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, the folks at Postini have failed to take Microsoft's abysmal software into account: You can view/delete quarantied spam up to 200 at a time, but viruses must be deleted 10 at a time. Thpthpthpthpthpptt!
Microsoft: Creating the most effective virus development tools for over 10 years!
This is so true (Score:5, Funny)
I've just been creating more and more filters that send to trash with no notification to anyone.
Of course, you have to pay attention when you first turn some of the capabilities on, as Norton kindly preset you to block AOL mail
Re:This is so true (Score:2)
Re:This is so true (Score:5, Funny)
*ducks*
Re:This is so true (Score:4, Funny)
Must
Consult
Someone
Else
How about a real email client or real rules? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:How about a real email client or real rules? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, we can remove capabilities in order to increase safety, but with users like that... I'm really not sure what we should do. Authenticating the sender and receiver of all email would be a step.
Re:How about a real email client or real rules? (Score:3, Informative)
Milter to block messages containing windows-executable attachments [flyingbuttmonkeys.com].
Hallelujah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Letter contents incase of /.'ing (Score:3, Informative)
Why (some) anti-virus companies are to blame for the recent
e-mail flood
As everyone should now know, Sobig.F has generated a tremendous amount of e-mail traffic world-wide. However, part of the blame for this traffic should be placed on some of the anti-virus companies.
What I am referring to is the large number of incorrectly configured mail filters that respond by sending a "virus alert" to the "From:" address. As Sobig.F falsifies the "From:" address, these e-mails just clutter up the mailboxes of innocent, non-infected people. These messages cause unnecessary annoyance and worry, as they typically (and incorrectly) claim that people have sent out a virus.
When you get an e-mail, warning you of a Sobig.F infection, with a subject line similar to these:
* *** detected and quarantined a virus in a message you sent.
* Warning: E-mail viruses detected
* Virus Detected by ***
* This is an alert from ***
it usually means that someone, somewhere has made a bad decision on how to react to infected mail, either by selecting a substandard product or by configuring it incorrectly.
Worse yet, if mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic. This makes them a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.
The problem is that some commercial mail filters have this behaviour set as the default. At least one filter gives only two options: Always send a "virus alert" to the "From" address of every infected e-mail received or "pass the message through to the recipient". Clearly neither of these options are acceptable.
I have only one word for this: Stupid!
Acceptable behaviour would be one of the following:
1. Have the mail filter properly distinguish between worms that falsify the "From:" address and ones that do not and only send a warning message when the "From:" address is likely to be genuine.
2. Do not send the alerts at all.
In fact, sending an alert automatically to the From: address for every virus or worm received by e-mail should not even be a selectable option.
With Sobig.F scheduled to die out today, Sept. 10th, the problem might go away for a while - until the next similar worm appears. And this is the scary part. Sobig.F didn't really infect that many machines world-wide, maybe only 200.000 or so. This is only a fraction of the number of machines infected by Msblaster (Lovsan). Now imagine a worm combining the distribution method of Msblaster with the mass-mailing feature of Sobig.F. The flood of traffic might practically render the Internet unusable.
Eventually, some virus author will create a virus like this, maybe this month, maybe in a few years, but it will happen. And when it does we do not need the anti-virus companies making a bad situation worse.
I hope the "guilty" anti-virus producers will be updating their products in the near future, but this is not going to happen unless their customers request it.
Fridrik Skulason ( frisk@f-prot.com )
Founder of FRISK Software International
Re:Letter contents incase of /.'ing (Score:2)
No doubt! (Score:5, Interesting)
I set our filters to just delete anything with an executable attachment, but that didn't to crap for the stupid "Virus Detected" warnings.
One guy was sending us about 150 copies a day, and the others his PC sent out with our address as the "from" resulted in about 50-75 Virus warnings a day - from the first day it popped up until it expired. I had his IP address, and called and e-mailed his ISP (Birch.net) a dozen or more times, and they did squat. 150 x ~100k x # of people in his address book - not to mention the undeliverables and virus warnings - and they did nothing.
Fuzzy Math (Score:4, Interesting)
A "your message was filtered" is maybe 2-3K including all headers (more likely under 1k), so responding to messages with Virus' in them adds 1-3% not 100% to the traffic.
That being said, since most of the current generation of SoBig happily fake the "From" email address, a reply to the from address doesn't really help anyone either.
So in the worst case scenario, a 3K reply to a fake email address results in a bounce message, so at the most you've got 5% overhead, and theoretically for that 6K of email, you've saved a user from getting infected, which would generate 100K*1000's of data.
I'd say it's not too high a price to pay.
Re:Fuzzy Math (Score:5, Insightful)
First, there's a cost per message that you're not including. Every message I get I have to consider and read, or delete. I'm getting tons of virus bounces, even though I've never sent a virus - the virus uses forged headers. So, for me, someone who has no way to contract a virus, my "work"load has gone up noticably, and the price I pay went from $0 to $X where X is a positive number.
Second, the autoresponder is not a necessary part of the virus removal. The savings is already there by blocking the virus from infecting the user's computer. The bounce is just an extra thing the anti-virus people put in to try to advertise their product.
It's *pretty damn close* to being spam.
Re:Fuzzy Math (Score:3, Interesting)
First off, disclaimer: My mail servers have been (until SoBig) configured to send "Hey, you sent us a virus" messages. We stopped this practice because SoBig is so damn prolific that it proved to us this was absolutely worthless and harmful.
That said, there are some REALLY stupid people out there that not only bounce to the "sender," b
Re:Fuzzy Math (Score:3, Informative)
There are bigger problems than just the total amount of traffic. Lets say you run a domain that's in thousands and thousands of address books and Internet cache files... like "real.com". Now lets say that a multithreaded virus starts emailing itself as rapidly as possible to all of the addresses it can find... like SoBig.F.
Care to gues
Re:Fuzzy Math (Score:4, Interesting)
I completely agree (Score:5, Insightful)
The messages generally contain no usefull information, and are deleted without reading.
Spam catchers should be combined with anti virus solutions, to ensure that authentic messages do generate some sort of response, either to the sender or receiving, informing them of the infection. The technologies would mesh well in this case.
5xx is the answer (Score:4, Informative)
As a mailing list manager... (Score:2, Interesting)
This FRISK dude needs to go back and look at his assumptions:
Worse yet, if mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic.
huh? If person A's infected machine sends out 100 emails, and the one received by person Q generates a reply to sender, how does this double the amount of traffic. Sheesh!
Re:As a mailing list manager... (Score:2)
In the off chance that you're not just trolling, you're clearly missing the obvious. Person A sends out 100 infected emails. Person Q1's antivirus generates an email to forged sender. Person Q2's antivirus generates an email... Person Q3's antivirus generates... 97 emails later
We've started to filter bounce messages. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's pretty rare that an e-mail that we send out does not eventually get to its recipient, and in most cases the e-mail is in response to something so the recipient will let us know if they aren't getting a message from us, so this system
Not entirely true (Score:2)
What about all the emails these virus detectors PREVENT by warning the user about the potential virii in the emails.
Remember, the average user isnt that smart. We dont want to prevent them from getting their mail. We do want to warn them. Not only this, the warning emails are likely just local anyways, so this isnt going to be too bad of a traffic increase.
If everyone used even the worst em
Sobig.F gone quiet (Score:2)
Any sightings of Sobig.G in the wild yet? Everybody was predicting it to be released today.
Doubling messages, not traffic (Score:2, Informative)
However, as the recipient of 300+ messages a day, I for one would be delighted if the virus scanners had an option to Just Shut Up when they find a specific virus. While I don't believe the scanners aggravated the problem -- indeed, by reducing its transmission, they certainly improved
And if you get enough of them... (Score:2)
Are there any mailservers that can check if you've received a message previously? Maybe they should have a 'Sent' mailbox and check against them. It could clear it out every ten minutes of everything older than 24 hours, ensuring you'd get 1 notice a day max. If these filters are outside the server, it should be easy for them to offer this. Shouldn't it?
Good for this guy... (Score:5, Interesting)
Granted, if nobody talked about AIDS, the infection rate would probably skyrocket too. So is it better that there be a symptom of the virus such as increased network traffic. Or is it better to not inform external users and try to repair in house?
Maybe it offers a little job security too though.
It's viewed as promotion (Score:5, Interesting)
So the bounce messages go something like "Our mail server detected a virus in an email you appear to have sent, and we protected our customer
I don't know if it's effective at all, but it sure doesn't cost much - the virus notification is essentially a mild form of SPAM which few people really get up in arms about.
Just to understand, there are market conditions behind those virus notices...
Re:It's viewed as promotion (Score:2)
Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's certainly better than blaming a _client_ problem on the _network_ which when it was designed didn't anticipate (understandably) a near monoculture of such vunerable products being deployed.
Just got my hand slapped by Data Security (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, I get 50-100 messages from "helpful" virus checkers telling me that I sent them a virus. Duh, of course I didn't. But what's worse is when they try to help my by sending the damned virus back to me! So my Eudora inbox fills up with viruses. No problem, I just delete them, right?
But we've got real-time virus scanning installed, and the admins take a dim view of tweaking it to skip certain directories. It finds that In.mbx contains a virus and kills the file. Poof, there goes my Eudora inbox. Frustrating, but it was full of junk anyway.
This morning, though, I get a call from the head Data Security honcho. Norton called mommy when it found the virus, and did it often enough for me to show up on the admin guy's radar again. Now, I'm going to have to quit using Eudora at work, just because brain-dead virus protection is sending me viruses! I'd fight it again, but I have to agree -- if I keep downloading viruses, I'm part of the problem.
Thanks for nothing, AV companies. All you're doing is keeping yourselves in business with false virus alerts. Or maybe that was the "2. ???" in between "1. Spread Viruses" and "3. Profit!"
Cry me a river (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh huh.
So you wanna read your personal email at the office. Fine if your company supports that.
But then you just absolutely positively gotta use only your favorite email client, not the one already installed, not a web portal. The email client now installed by you, presumably licensed to you, that is not owned or supported by IS. The one that makes IS's day that much tougher by throwing one more ingredient into the stew that is the company's desktop computer.
Now on top if it your personal email client reading your personal email is bringing in viruses to the company. Onto that corporate PC logged into the corporate network. And dammit those nasty folks in IS aren't willing to spend their time making exceptions to the virus scanning so your unique-in-the-company personal email client reading your personal, virus-infected email is exempted.
Cry me a river.
The worst of it is ... (Score:2)
I'm still fielding like 400 auto-generated emails from various anti-virus software each day. The author's suggestion to simply stop the alerts is not that far fetched at all.
Obligatory bad analogy: it's like pelting someone with rocks in order to warn them they're about to be run over by a c
Not the problem (Score:3, Interesting)
THE problem is the mail filters which also send a second message to postmaster@whatever domain. Whatever brainiac thought that one up should be shot.
His two minutes (Score:4, Insightful)
Until recently, no e-mail worms spoofed the email address. F-Prot obviously never had the functionality of replying to infected emails.
Until just recently, it was really good to reply to the sender alerting him about the fact that he sent out a virus/worm. Where was F-Prot back then??
The way I see it, it's been three steps.
Step 1: No email worms.
Step 2: Email worms that didn't spoof the sender (replying to sender is good).
Step 3: Email worms that spoof the sender (replying to sender is bad).
Seems to me that F-Prot is complaining that everyone hasn't reached step 3 yet (with spoofed sender addresses, infected emails shouldn't be replied to), even though we pretty much reached it just now. Before Sobig, even though there were worms that spoofed the sender, they were a minority. After Sobig, spoofing worms are a majority, which means that AV products need to change. This won't happen in a second like it did for F-Prot, because most AV vendors didn't skip step 2 like F-Prot did.
This coming from a company who 95% of computer users never heard, and who never even added the functionality of replying to emails even though it was really good until just recently, makes me believe his just looking for his two minutes of fame.
Re:His two minutes (Score:5, Informative)
Autoreplies have always been problematic at best, which anyone who's experienced the annoyance caused by vacation programs on public mailing lists can attest to. Autoreplies to automatically generated traffic have always been a no-no.
Viruses and worms are clearly autogenerated traffic.
Also, although 95% of computer users have never heard of FRISK, Fridrik has been a respected member of the A/V community since it very began and wrote one of the very first virus scanners.
Disclaimer: I work for FRISK, writing said e-mail filter code. But I can tell you with authority that the decision was taken a long time ago.
Re: Forged From: viruses (Score:5, Informative)
What is your definition of "recently"? Apparently it's about two years.
Microsoft EULA Security Update enclosed: (Score:4, Funny)
A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise a computer running Microsoft Windows and install Linux on it. You can help protect your computer by installing this EULA from Microsoft. After you install this EULA, a NULL update will be downloaded for your benefit.
No here is a better use (Score:2)
Try our new penis enlargement patch and make your lady love you forever.
Use the bounce messages as vehicle for spamming.
Not doubling traffic. (Score:2, Insightful)
Not quite. Fortunately the alert emails are (usually) just text, and not some several-kilobyte attachment. They may be doubling the messages, but certainly nowhere *near* the bandwidth used.
One would hope the anti-virus tool folks could build in ways to sniff out "Oh, this is a SoBig-laden email" and *not* send out t
Speaking of bad email filters... (Score:4, Funny)
MailMarshal (an automated content monitoring gateway) has stopped the following email for the following reason:
It believes it may contain unacceptable language, or inappropriate material.
Message: B000038072.00000001.mml
From: xxx@xxx.com
To: xxx@xxx.com
Subject: Re: So Whuz Up?
Please remove any inappropriate language and send it again.
The blocked email will be automatically deleted after 5 days.
MailMarshal Rule: Inbound Messages : Block Unacceptable Language Script Offensive Language (Basic) Triggered
Expression: asshole Triggered 1 times weighting 5
Email security by MailMarshal from Marshal Software.
So the message tells both the ortiginal sender and I that it won't deliver the email because it contains the term "asshole". So it lets me know that by sending me an email telling me the exact same word that was supposed to be filtered? It seems like we've got a hypocrytical mail filter here
Of course not. (Score:4, Interesting)
At no point should a response be generated for a virus. Maybe five years ago, when viruses tagged along with legitimate data, but nowadays, a virus generates it's own delivery system, and there's no point to a bounce.
The response I got - it IS part of the problem (Score:5, Interesting)
My name is Geoff Fox and I am writing because I have received hundreds upon hundreds of message bounces from your **** mail server.
These messages are not originating with me. These are SoBig virus generated and are spoofing my address as the return.
I am asking nicely, but I need you to take action immediately. I am attaching a bounce message so you can see what I've received. From the headers it looks like they're actually coming from ***.com
Sincerely, Geoff Fox
I did get a response... but not what I had expected.
Geoff, Thanks for raising the issue of the SoBig virus infection.
From the information that you have provided, it does look like the infected machine is located at **** Architecs, Inc. of Harford, CT. Their contact information is provided below.
Have your IT technical staff contact the admistrative contact or the technical contact below. They may not realize that they have a SoBig infected machine and that it needs to be cleaned.
(whois stuff deleted)
It was signed by their Director of IT Security.
So, even at that level, he didn't realize he was doing something wrong... or that these bouncebacks came from him, not from the site that was infected. And, he felt it was my obligation to do something about it, not his!
Here's what can be done. (Score:4, Insightful)
Messages from known spamming autoresponders should be blocked by spam filters. A publicly available list of canned text appearing in messages from spamming autoresponders should be made available and placed into mail filters.
That should deal with the problem.
Re:Here's what can be done. (Score:3, Interesting)
Consider - I, and a lot of you too, I'm sure - routinely send out e-mail with a From address that has a domain unrelated to that of the outgoing SMTP server we are using. How can you tell the difference between such messages and those forged by viruses?
FYI Taco and Mar (Score:5, Informative)
SoBig.F is not an Outlook worm. It is a Windows worm. It does not require Outlook to run. It has it's own built in MTA and grabs email addresses from cached webpages and local text files as well as the Outlook/Express address book.
-Ab
Troublesome? Yes, but necessary ... (Score:4, Interesting)
But unfortunately it seems that it could be illegal in Germany to intercept a message without notifying the sender. As far as I understand it, eMail seems to be subject to the same regulations as snail mail here, so dropping the message silently could constitute a legal hazard
Message Headers should be Compulsory (Score:5, Insightful)
I followed up with several of the administrators running the virus filters. In all cases, the administrators had quarantined the messages without headers so it was impossible to tell what machine really sent the message. I would have liked to know this information so as to have some hope of tracing the owner of the infected machine.
I understand why users are unaware of headers. Microsoft's products go out of their way to hide them. In Outlook Express, to get headers you have to find the relevant show headers pull-down and even then the headers appear in a too-small non-resizable window. You have to clip the contents and paste into a real window before the headers can be read/forwarded.
The "From:" field of email means no more than the snail-mail return address that you scribble on an envelope. The header, like the snail-mail postmark, tells the origin.
What is the excuse for vendors of email software (filtering or end-user) perpetrating unawareness of this basic property of email?
an Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
seems like abetter solution as it gets the virus warning in hands of the person that can do soemthing about it rather than sent to people who have no virus on their systems..
comeon how hard is it to parse the record gotten back from a whois query?
amavisd-new doesn't send mail for Sobig, others (Score:3, Informative)
Later versions of the amavisd-new [www.ijs.si] mail scanner don't send mail to sender addresses from virii/worms that forge mail headers, even if you have it configured to do so.
What I Think (Score:3, Informative)
This won't catch every virus-infected file attachment (like Word macro viruses), but the regex I put in place will block files with certain file extensions (e.g. pif, exe, etc.) What's nice is that the mail is rejected during the SMTP transaction and produces no residual mail traffic since the sending mail server is the worm's SMTP engine.
So, for anyone using Postfix 2 who would like to stop most e-mail worms, using header_checks to scan MIME headers is a very effective way to protect your customers/users.
Not lousy, just misconfigured (Score:3, Informative)
It would be nice if GeCAD would rewrite their software to stop the notice from being sent when the virus is Klez, Sobig, etc. But since GeCAD got bought out [slashdot.org] by Microsoft who will be discontinuing their product line, I know that will never happen. Hopefully someone else like Sophos will.
Re:iHateSpam (Score:2)
Re:Mod story -1 (Duh...) (Score:3, Insightful)
You have to fool around with it in a most confusing way to get it to stop doing that. Like all good Windows management interfaces, it's confusing and inconsistent. But I digress...
Re:Is that better than... (Score:2)
Re:Outlook (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The need for digital signatures. (Score:4, Insightful)
The fact that the private keys are going to be stored on PCs owned by people who don't grok public/private key care one bit. Not to mention that a new worm should have no trouble lifting those keys off the box and spraying them around for a new forge attack.
Re:Bounces are good, just not for Sobig.F (Score:3, Insightful)
ALL "modern" viruses fake the return address.
Re:Nice try, but .... (Score:4, Interesting)