Subject: RE: Eliminating Virus Spam

From: Lillian Komlossy <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 17:35:40 -0500

I'm not posting much so bear with me - I really want to share this with you.
The first step would be for everyone to be aware if they have received,
opened (duh) and thus are sending out a virus. I don't mean on this list - I
believe everyone here is diligent about this - for the most part.  As an
added safety feature I advise not to keep any listserver address in the
Outlook Contacts list.  
As far as the anti-virus spam, well it is obviously a 'shameless plug'. One
way of advertising that they detected a virus is to broadcast it to everyone
who 'would have received it' but they were 'saved by this wonderful
anti-virus software' - you get the picture. Otherwise how would you know a
company called "Antigen" even exists? Of course they might achieve the
opposite effect. Now we don't even want to know.
To summarize it, viruses need to be handled once they are out there, also
folks have to be notified but there must be a better way than filling
everyone's mailbox with 'dumbo-spam'. I am thinking of a server-side action
such as: Antivirus detects virus, removes attachment, adds to body of email:
"Virus xyz detected in attachment - attachment removed." Any other info will
only be available to the admin of the mail server. 
As far as these antivirus-spam messages are concerned, perhaps it is worth
the trouble to find a way to save a 'template' of the most frequent ones,
flag incoming emails if the subject or the 'from' field contains 'Antivirus'
or 'Virus' or 'Detected' and scan the flagged emails against the templates.
If they are identical except for the variables, just drop them. Maybe find a
way to just get the first one through so everybody will be alerted - once.

Thanks for your time and I wish you a Happy, Prosperous New Year!

Lillian

Lillian Komlossy || Site Manager || http://www.dmnews.com ||
http://www.imarketingnews.com || 212 925-7300 ext. 232 ||
mailto:[email-masked]

-----Original Message-----
From: John Border [mailto:[email-masked]]
Sent: Wednesday, January 03, 2001 12:41 PM
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Eliminating Virus Spam

    I am not that familiar with the details of how mailing list servers
work. 
Is it possible to configure a mailing list server (e.g. [email-masked]?)
to do a virus scan on an incoming mail message before forwarding it to the
mailing list, bouncing the mail message back to the sender if a virus is
detected?  (Or, since From addresses might be faked, maybe just tossing it
is
the right answer.)  If such a capability doesn't exist, maybe it should...

John

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 03 Jan 2001 21:09:04 -0500

> opened (duh) and thus are sending out a virus.

the first step would be for everyone to stop running mail user agents
that automatically open potentially harmful attachments.

the second step would be for the manufacturers of such user agents 
to get hit with a massive class action lawsuit.  after all - this 
has been a known problem for ten years, there have been multiple 
widely publicized attacks in the past.  any vendor that continues 
to expose its customers to such security risks certainly shares
some of the liability.

Keith