Sobig virus back...AGAIN...new variant.

USA Today | 8/19/2003

[LinuxRocks]

Sobig.F email work is causing problems!

[dansangel]

Thanks for the ping. Norton has caught and quarantined 6 emails entering my Outlook program since last night that contain this virus.

Really puts me in a bad mood.....

[JustPiper]

Does it just travel through email, there has to be cyber-terror going on, they promised it!

[JustPiper]

Couldn't anyone begin a class action lawsuit on Gates? Windows gave a patch if I understand right that was vulnerable to yet another email virus? And the patch itself reinifected many?

[boxerblues]

I dont know..not a techie. Im confused over this one. We have a new ISP so not many know my new email address and I am getting emails out the yingyang tonight with this virus attached, mostly from hotmail accounts and a few others. I can't delete them out fast enough

[JustPiper]

Not a techie either...thats horrible what your going through, I don't get how thats happening!

[Redcloak]

"How do you stop it short of putting a block on all incoming mail?"

Don't use "Lookout!" Get Mozilla...

http://www.mozilla.org

Other mail readers aren't compatible with the worm. Readers like Mozilla just stare stupidly at the worm without a clue as to how to run it. No run, no worm, no worries. I'm sure that other mail readers are just as incompatible with these MS worms. I happen to like Mozilla for it's anti-spam feature. It can be taught what is and isn't spam. It then moves spam off to a junk folder and deletes it after X days. (This feature has caught roughly 300 spam messages on our account over the past 7 days!)

Of course, a more radical approach is to stop using that one particularly worm-compatible operating system from the "Land of rain and espresso".

: )

[Gil4]

Gerald Holmes'es Why Micorsoft rules my Univrese

A laugh break might lower the blood pressure. Annoying pop-up ads, but what do you expect from "micorsoft's" leading advocate. It's old, but it's still funny.

[Young Rhino]

I bet implementation of an Islamic punishment (say amputation of hands) would stop this sh#t cold. Kind of hard to type up those viruses without fingers.

[Amelia]

My antivirus caught 2 emails infected with this one yesterday. I didn't know either sender. FWIW.

[epluribus_2]

I agree - MS - $ucks, but the alternatives are worse...

[AppyPappy]

I deeply saddened that I haven't gotten even 1 email with this. I guess I don't have any friends.

[boxerblues]

Don't use "Lookout!" Get Mozilla...

I not using outlook, thats what has me baffled here

[Physicist]

I deleted almost 500 of these puppies from my personal inbox yesterday (on a Solaris system). I'm avoiding looking at my email this morning.

[Physicist]

I deeply saddened that I haven't gotten even 1 email with this. I guess I don't have any friends.

Oh, no problem. The other day I ordered a computer from Dell. Three or four of the first ten copies I got had a Dell address. Could be coincidence, I suppose, but if you go and order something, perhaps we can test it out.

[Physicist]

Update: I received 637 new messages overnight. An increasing percentage of the messages are from machines saying that they blocked copies coming from my machine. Since my machine is a Sun running Solaris, that's not possible; obviously the worm is pulling my email address out of other people's address books, and putting it in the "reply to" field.

[AppyPappy]

We have a campus exchange server and I'm guessing it is stomping it as it comes in.

The whole flipping campus is roped off. I tried to go to the bookstore and you can't get there because of student move-in. I need to go to Squires to install some software and I need a helicopter to get there.

[Physicist]

Update: I received 637 new messages overnight.

Another 91 deleted since last update. They seem to be coming in about 1 per minute. About 10% of these are notifications from antivirus programs.

[LinuxRocks]

"obviously the worm is pulling my email address out of other people's address books, and putting it in the "reply to" field."

Yes, it is doing exactly that. It reads the M$ address book, mines all the unique emails contained therein, and sends itself to all those email addresses. I support the mail server of a mortgage company, and their brokers computers that are outside the firewall are infected. It is mining their address books and trying to send itself to receipients at the mortgage company. I have at least 5 alerts every 2 minutes, and each alert adds files to the quarantine on the server. It is making a huge mess, not to mention the bandwidth on the net it is wasting. Thank M$ for all of this.

[LinuxRocks]

"We have a campus exchange server and I'm guessing it is stomping it as it comes in."

It is probably causing the mail admins alot of headaches I'm guessing, as it is creating alot of unnecessary traffic and eating up lots of disk space on servers as it spreads itself around.

[IpaqMan]

I have received over 700 virus related messages in the past day. Most of them are from anti-virus utilities returning email supposedly sent by me (forged reply address). In the midst of the flood, I received about a dozen "real" emails and some spam.

So I added a message filter looking for the word SOBIG, the sender MAILER-DAEMON, postmaster, mail*, the subject AUTOREPLY and so on. About eighty percent of the bad email now dumps into a special folder. That makes the flood easier to manage.