I’ve got to say that the latest virus making the rounds, SoBig, sucks. Big time.
Yesterday morning, I noticed that I was getting an unusually high amount of junk mail. SpamAssassin, thankfully, was diverting it over to the purgatory I’ve devoted to spam, but there were so many. By about 10am, I had over 25 messages. By 4pm, I had in excess of 80 – all with the same few subjects, the same attachments, and a near-identical size (108k).
In addition, though, something else cropped up: messages were being bounced back to me as undeliverable. Of course, I hadn’t sent any of these messages; the virus simply ruffles through one’s address book and web cache to get phony “From:” addresses. But some overzealous mail admins bounce back messages with viruses – thus, I got ’em, even though I didn’t send them.
Whenever a virus hits like this, it’s little more than annoyance for me since I’m not on Windows; bandwidth sucking is the bigger issue. I had 80 messages, the Ping got over 200, and I’m sure other people got more. But why don’t people step back and look at the bigger picture when this happens? Be smart about email, be smart about attachments, and if you have to run Windows, you have to apply patches.
Posted in Technology