Re: OT: HEADS-UP: viral storm out there

On Sat, 2003-09-20 at 18:47, Christopher Browne wrote:
> After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, ron.l.johnson@cox.net (Ron Johnson) belched out...:
> > On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 17:16, Christopher Browne wrote:
> >> Nikola.Milutinovic@ev.co.yu ("Nikola Milutinovic") writes:
> >> > This is off topic and is a cross-post, so I'll be brief. There is a
> >> > very nasty virus out there and I urge everybody to get their AV in
> >> > order. The virus is known as: "W32.Gibe-F" or "W32.Swen-A".
> >>
> >> CERT has a report on it (if the URL resolves :-().
> >>
> >> http://www.cert.org/current/current_activity.html#swena
> >>
> >> I have been receiving _thousands_ of these today, and others are
> >> reporting similar.  It's as bad for us not running W32 as it is for
> >> those that are...
> >
> > Except they can get infected.
>
> No, it can be worse for "us" that aren't infected, because our systems
> are a little more robust so that instead of falling over due to the
> load, we wind up actually receiving all the messages, which is a
> further problem.
>
> In the end (and we're not exactly at the "end" yet), I wound up
> receiving about 1500 of the messages, which, after I punted them into
> my ~/Mail/deleted path, and cpio'ed and gzipped them, turned into
> about 80MB of compressed material, corresponding to probably 170MB of
> data.  (Yes, I'll purge it.)
>
> My systems didn't go down, but 170MB of bandwidth got eaten.  I'm just
> lucky that my ISP has recently moved over to a "we don't charge for
> overuse of bandwidth" policy.  There used to be a fee for going over a
> certain "cap."

I'm waiting for the day that someone fires up a class action lawsuit
against m$ for all the excess bandwidth fees users end up paying due to
bugs in m$ software. That or the government decides to issue a recall on
outlook due to the monumental cost it has on the nations economy... we
seem to recall every other sort of product, why not software?

Robert Treat
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