Re: Attachment attack

At 10:16 -0700 2004-07-19, Larry M. Jones wrote:
>... We are being bombarded with emails with attachments. MP3's,
>CPL's, Com's, EXE's. They come from OLAC, Sherry Rogers, Optometry
>Card, UCBackup, etc. Anybody know anything about this? Can CalMail
>stop this?

   From the CalMail home page:

>Bagle AG worm hitting CalMail - July 19, 2004
>
>A new variant of the Bagle worm starting hitting the CalMail system
>this morning. Our anti-virus software is currently blocking incoming
>infected messages and we will be deleting already delivered ones as
>the day progresses. Please do not open any attachments, even if they
>are from someone that you know.

   This will happen again, and at this point there appears to be
little that CalMail's administrators or any other email systems'
administrators can do about this. We've already witnessed several
windows of opportunity - typically of at least several hours in
duration - that new worms and viruses, or new variants thereof, have
passed through those systems without being detected by virus scanning
software.

   As noted in a sidebar in the Spring 2004 Berkeley Computing and
Communications article, "Protect your computer from 'worms' in email
attachments"
<http://istpub.berkeley.edu:4201/bcc/Spring2004/updateav.html>:

>Don't count on your email system to block all worms and viruses. ...
>Even under ordinary circumstances, messages containing brand-new
>worms and viruses might not be detected by your email system's
>[virus] scanner for some number of hours, until [vendors'] virus
>updates catch up.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Mon Jul 19 11:12:55 2004