Sobig PITA
August 20th, 2003 by Kelson. Posted in Annoyances, Viruses and tagged for backscatter, scanner, sobig, virusThe world of email viruses has changed. In the old days, they would piggyback on the messages you sent, or make your regular mail program send them out while you weren’t looking. These days they send the messages themselves, so they pick a fake return address from the same source as its list of victims: address books, web caches, and so on.
The return address on a virus like Sobig doesn’t mean crap.
So why the heck are all these idiotic virus scanners sending me messages saying “You sent us a virus!” when a cursory glance at the headers clearly shows that it originated on the other side of the planet?
I’ve already got the server filtering out the virus itself – I’m seriously thinking about filtering out the useless warnings.
My Amazon Wishlist
I regularly get bogus bounces from clueless virus scanners that don’t realize the sending address is fake 99% of the time, but this…
Viral degrees of separation
With the new crop of email viruses – the ones that fake the return address based on the same sources (address books, web caches, etc.) as the target list – you get a few interesting effects.
The first is that there is a good chance you’ll recieve…