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F*cking virii!
2003-08-19

So, I wake up this morning to the sound of my pager (still oncall for Neotonic, of course) and our monitoring software is complaining about our MX machines. Groggily wander over to my computer, and sure enough we're getting inundated with mail. A quick random check of the contents, and a Google search or two later, and lookee, we have sobig.f@MM. Run a manual update to get the latest virus files, manually delete all messages in the queue with details.pif, and go back to sleep. The joy of supporting installations with millions of email customers, when a new email virus spreads, you get DoS'd.

Of course, when I wake up again and check my own email, I've been bombarded with bounce notices and the like from people who think I've sent them the virus. Now, I haven't seen a virus in quite a while which actually uses the email address of the infected user as the sender, but I don't pay that close of attention, largely because there are no known virii for mutt. So, I get to delete bounce messages all day that aren't helping anyone. Trakken, by default, is set up to just delete messages with viruses, because doing anything else isn't going to help. We actually get more virus mail than spam mail, accounting for 5-85% of the email volume, depending on the client.

At least we didn't have to worry about the Blaster virus. We need more non-email virii!


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