SoBig: Worst is Yet to Come 683
bl8n8r writes "Experts say when vacationers get back to work
Monday, Inboxes will unleash the worms worst attacks.
Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems.
"
Skeptical (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has serious problems (Score:4, Insightful)
This should tell investors that they are wasting their money.
This should tell companies that they are wasting their money.
Someone, somewhere, will hopefully get a clue.
school's in! (Score:3, Insightful)
Brain-dead auto-responders... (Score:5, Insightful)
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
At best, this is collateral damage. At worst, these rejection messages are actually advertising the IP addresses of infected systems. Should a virus drop a back door payload, this would multiply the damage.
k.
Why deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe I'm missing something here, but why do businesses and consumers put up with this stuff?
Re:Worst I've seen by FAR (Score:5, Insightful)
Vacation? (Score:5, Insightful)
that seems like a pretty weak overall premise for an expected resurgence.
now if he said that he expects a steady stream of continued activity into early next month, due to all the people who take vacations throughout august - he might have a point.
but to suggest that these 'vacationers' will unleash the same spam deluge monday that the rest of the unwashed have given us this past week, is a bit shaky.
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Even worse... (Score:5, Insightful)
The situation is even worse than that: Most (all?) of the virus scanners sending me autoreplies correctly identified the virus as being Sobig -- which always uses spoofed source addresses.
Sending autoreplies is sometimes useful, but these scanners should at very least have a table which tells them, for each virus, whether an autoreply should be sent (ie, a table which specifies if a virus uses spoofed source addresses).
Another brick in the wall (Score:4, Insightful)
Accepting DRM/TPCA (otherwise unsigned code can run)
Outlawing P2P
Port filtering by ISPs
Accepting blind AutoUpdates
[US]Cheering on the Patriot Act[/US]
'outlawing' Spam
All in the name of 'security'. Insert obligatory Franklin quote: Those who would trade freedom for security will lose both, and deserve neither.
Read between the lines (Score:5, Insightful)
And who is Marc Sunner? he's the CTO of MessageLabs. And what does MessageLabs do, you ask? see for yourself, from the main page at messagelabs.com:
Email security today is a global issue which pervades whole organizations. Viruses, spam, pornographic material and other harmful or unwanted content represent a serious risk to your company. To combat these all too real threats, you need a total, proven and effective solution. Only MessageLabs can assure you of complete peace of mind from complete email security
$500 to $1000 to clean up each infected machine? Right, whatever Marc. And it's obvious you don't have *any* interest in propagating that baloney too. (on second thought, if you hire me to clean your machines, I'll do 5% discount off that price).
Another fine impartial article reposted by Slashdot. (By the way, the word you're looking for is "advertising")
The Slashdot story missed the interesting part... (Score:4, Insightful)
So is that the solution to spam? Maybe someone should write a worm that always has the same payload so it can be easily filtered. We never have to see the fake spam messages, the real spammers won't be able to send harder-to-filter messages, and the server owners of those loose servers will have an incentive to clean up their act with the worm eating up all of their bandwidth.
Actually, extending this, maybe the way to fight open machines is to cause the open machines to send themselves excessive traffic, rendering them fairly useless until their operators fix them, but not negatively impacting the rest of the net.
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
I was being a little glib there, but it should be pointed out that the labor costs associated with managing all of this crap are pretty serious. Overtime charges, benefits and basic salary for an $74k employee for the last three days are running what? At least $1000k per employee. With eight IT dudes running around fixing all of the Wintel systems that's eight grand worth of new Macs that will have much better uptime and lower costs just from the last three days alone. Now, consider how many of these little virus and worm issues there have been in the past year.
Guess what it is here already. (Score:2, Insightful)
how can people fall for it... again (Score:5, Insightful)
What I find discouraging is that the lemmings are falling for it despite this being The Week of Teh Worm.
All the hopeful articles that have sited users claiming a new awareness of the risk of worms and virii seem to be pipe dreams.
Dumb users are dumb users and the more infectuous and persistant the virus, the more networks are going to get hammered. Why oh why aren't all pif, scr, exe, com, and vbs attachments just blocked by the MDA. There is no good reason for allowing an end user the huge complexity of choosing whether or not to click on the latest attachment that's come to them from "the internet".
If the lemmings are getting suckered this week... when every news medium is blathering on about viruses worming their way through nuclear reactors and motor vehicle registration offices, what hope is there for when the attention has settled?
Re:Vacation? (Score:3, Insightful)
The rest of the victims got it in bits and pieces - but the vacationers will unleash it in hourly bursts, as they come into the office.
It'll only be a 10-20% boost, probably, but it'll be the biggest "all in one" boost.
Re:Microsoft has serious problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Brain-dead auto-responders... (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't care. The point of those messages is not some public service of informing people that their computers are infected, the point is to advertise the virus software.
Actually, I take that back. I did get one scanner-autoreply today that included full headers, which let me track down the real culprit. But most of them are blatent advertising, I report them as spam to the virus cartel's upstream provider.
Re:Even worse... (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't even need a table. If the domain in the From address doesn't match any of the Received headers, just silently bin the thing. This would also handle heuristic scans which pick up new viruses that aren't in the scanner's database yet.
But I don't think the virus cartel will want to give up their valuable source of free advertising, so I don't expect they will make any such changes.
hardware nat/firewall? (Score:3, Insightful)
It could, of course, be turned off by corporate IT folk who don't want to have it, or by the intrepid home user who knows what they are doing, but for the unwashed masses, would just 'be there'.
Anyway, would this provide any actual protection? And could it pass the UI test for the standard user?
Re:PIF (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:1, Insightful)
What vacation or holiday is this...?!
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
In order to make sure big pharmaceutical company CEOs can keep adding to their personal antique sports car collections, we allow the virus to multiply and infect millions daily.
Instead of carpet bombing the 3rd world with free condoms and cheap generic drugs. But that's no profitable.
Hold M$ Accountable!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Face it, most of us are in a technical position of some sort, and are looked upon for assistance because of the knowledge we possess.
My question is this: Who pays for our time? Is YOUR company expected to "eat" the costs of paying you for your time to sanitize their network from this malicious traversing code? Should it be the company's fault for utilizing software so prone to public vulnerabilities? Should the creators of the vulnerable software be held liable and accountable for their obvious flaws? Of course, tracking down the creators of the viruses is left up to the law enforcement officials and the persons charged with solving crimes. But, the viruses would not have existed if the vulnerabilities did not exist and were not exploited accordingly.
I understand that the Glock company cannot be held accountable if some person used their weapon to terminate somebody's life. However, in the act of homicide, there is a definitive exchange of decisions. In the case of the virus, the infected party neither intended to receive the virus, nor wanted the problems associated.
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
does "doing their job properly" include preventing end-users from touching the keyboards? let's face it, the network that remains unused always stays in a stable, functioning state. put users on it and then things go wrong.
Mac Users = Naive (Score:3, Insightful)
*sigh*. Nobody pays helpdesk people 74k in the US unless they have money to burn. If they do, let me know where I'll stop coding and start working helpdesk. All you need is a level 1 heldesk "dude" who makes about $10 an hour running around with a disk and the fix on it. Never mind if you applied the patch over a network. I have a mixed environment at work of Macs and PC's (and work on both) and the macs are no less crash prone than the PC's.
The only advantage to a mac is you don't have to worry about viruses for it because it's market share is so small no virus writer would be bothered with writing one. It makes more sense to hire a network admin who is halfway decent, updates virus protection etc than to change over to mac. Not to mention the costs involved with retraining people to use a mac.
If everyone followed your plan and switched over, do you really think that you wouldn't see more viruses and worms on the mac? I think mac users are a bit naive to assume they don't get worms/viruses because "mac is better". It's because virus writers for the most part don't know and don't care about mac.
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:2, Insightful)
Education is cheaper (in the long run) and it's even useful for other stuff, too.
Re:Speaking of getting a clue (Score:1, Insightful)
Opening attachments is the obvious, most useful thing to do. If people send you an attachment, you should be able to open it without cause for concern, because that's what attachments are for. People use attachments everyday in the course of their work, without doing anything wrong.
But because of deficiencies most email programs - the way they treat attachments - users get blamed instead of the software. This is completely backwards. When it can be done (and it can be here) , software should conform to users' habits, rather than the other way around. That's just common sense.
scary part (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Skeptical (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what world you're living in, but it isn't the one I'm posting from. You can be a brilliant IT guy who does his job incredibly well, but if a corporation's policies (i.e. waiting until a patch has been regression tested with bespoke applications) have you running around fixing things, it's the CIO that's not "worth anything" and not the "IT dudes".
And, of course, in the case where you're paid $74k/year (as the parent post mentioned), You Do What You're Told, or you quickly lose said salary.
Re:ban unpatched PCs (Score:2, Insightful)
--
hecubas
The law needs to assign responsibility (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sad waste of time, effort and money. (Score:3, Insightful)
Because they are students computers. When you start going to college, you'll understand this.
With the kind of time and resources you have, you could have every one of those computers running Debian in a week. Yes, I imagine one peroson can sit over 3 or 4 hand installs an hour, just like I can. Practice makes perfect and you are sure to get better than that. Oh well, good luck.
College. Students. They don't give a fuck about Linux. Why is it so hard for you to understand that some people like Windows?
Re:Some companies deserve it (Score:2, Insightful)
I too am a contractor to a large company and I feel no compuction about telling the people to whom I report when I see a problem. This normally results in my having to head up the effort that I have identified.
Re:Cost Benefit Analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
So basically, MS gets control because users let it be so. Or am I way off on this?
Re:school's in! (Score:1, Insightful)
Better filters (Score:3, Insightful)
The enhancements suggested above are simple to implement, but are still crude band aids. While I doubt I would ever *really* want to receive an executable attachment (heck -- most places won't even let me SEND it, let alone receive it), I might want to
(a) log it
(b) bounce a 'hey stoopid' message back a legit senders to tell them that if they need to send me something, it shouldn't be an executable (that's why god made ZIP)
There are some more complex procmail filters out there that specifically target certain worms. Is that more effective? I don't know. I can't understand them yet. I will soon. None of the procmail FAQs and "getting started" docs describe all those messy flags and things. I've got some more reading to do.
Meanwhile, this one lets me get work done other than downloading and deleting SOBIG messages. A few other worms will slip through, but at least it's manageable.
Re:Sobig not really M$'s fault (Score:2, Insightful)
The price of security is eternal vigilance, and it's a pain in the neck.