OT Viruses

"Martin Frey" wrote in message
...
The frequency of emails with viruses arriving on my PC has risen
sharply in the last couple of months (nearly all called W32sober,
though they are beginning to make me less than sober).

Getting them in and waiting while Norton does its thing is practically
doubling my online dialup time.

Am I alone or is this general?

Sorry OT but ...

-----------------------------
Martin Frey
http://www.hadastro.org.uk
N 51 01 52.2 E 0 47 21.1
-----------------------------
I too suffer from spam and in the study of spam headers i realised that
generally they seem to have 2 address in the From: header seperated by a
comma or semi-colon.

Put simply a kill rule in your email client deleting any mails with either ;
or , in the from line reduced my spam by at least 75%. Make sure they are
deleted and not moved to the trash folder where an innocent click can
unleash the beasts. And NEVER EVER un-subscribe from a spam list cos it just
adds you to 3 more ;(

Rob

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 12:17:41 +0000, Martin Frey wrote:

The frequency of emails with viruses arriving on my PC has risen
sharply in the last couple of months (nearly all called W32sober,
though they are beginning to make me less than sober).

Getting them in and waiting while Norton does its thing is practically
doubling my online dialup time.

Am I alone or is this general?

Sorry OT but ...

-----------------------------
Martin Frey
http://www.hadastro.org.uk
N 51 01 52.2 E 0 47 21.1
-----------------------------

Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.
Phil

Phil wrote:

Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

If only that were true. :-( Whilst Mac and Linux systems cannot be
infected with viruses, we still receive Windows viruses in e-mail and they
soak up our bandwidth by incessantly banging away on our firewalls.

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:26:24 +0000, Ed Holden wrote:

Phil wrote:

Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

If only that were true. :-( Whilst Mac and Linux systems cannot be
infected with viruses, we still receive Windows viruses in e-mail and they
soak up our bandwidth by incessantly banging away on our firewalls.

You are right there, and it is probably a pain for those on dial up to
receive lots of invitations to buy interesting medicines and so on, but
the upside is we dont need to have to scan every e mail for dubious
attatchments.
When I was still using Windows for e mail, I found it incredibly
frustrating at how slow it was to deal with the viruses being picked up
(even on broadband) by the antivirus software. I used to reckon on getting
around 90 messages a day, of which up to ten were infected, and
another 70 were general spam, and it would take up to half an hour to go
through my in box and sort everything out.
With Linux I still get the same number of messages and the same amount of
spam, but I can deal with it in a matter of minutes and not have to worry
about things wrecking my computer. And I dont have to spend any money on
operating systems, virus scanners and so on.
Phil

"Phil" wrote in message
news
Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

A very narrow minded view to take.

But to the original poster, yes I've noticed a surge in infected e-mails.

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
http://www.halflifeportal.com/ All things Half-Life.
http://www.xbox2portal.com/ Xbox 2 news.

*Replace nospam with smirnov to reply by e-mail*

Paul Smith wrote:

"Phil" wrote in message
news
Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

A very narrow minded view to take.

Except that it's true.

Currently.

Jim
--
AIM/iSight:JCAndrew2 - Log in and say 'hi'
"We deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal
laws of right and wrong break down; beyond those metaphysical
event horizons there exist ... special circumstances" - Use Of Weapons

Phil wrote:

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 12:17:41 +0000, Martin Frey wrote:

The frequency of emails with viruses arriving on my PC has risen
sharply in the last couple of months (nearly all called W32sober,
though they are beginning to make me less than sober).

Getting them in and waiting while Norton does its thing is practically
doubling my online dialup time.

Am I alone or is this general?

Sorry OT but ...

-----------------------------
Martin Frey
http://www.hadastro.org.uk
N 51 01 52.2 E 0 47 21.1
-----------------------------

Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

There's always a downside. Although Mac and Linux machines cannot be
infected they can pass the infection on through e-mail, etc, which is
the only reason Mac A/V software exists, at least for OS X.

Gates should be sued to bancrupcy for his sloppy coding.

--

Peter

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:11:20 GMT, in uk.sci.astronomy , Phil
wrote:


Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

Please do NOT distribute such nonsensical suggestions. Even a trivial
websearch proves your error.

--
Mark McIntyre
CLC FAQ http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/C-faq/top.html
CLC readme: http://www.ungerhu.com/jxh/clc.welcome.txt

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JRS: In article , dated
Fri, 17 Dec 2004 00:06:14, seen in news:uk.sci.astronomy, Mark McIntyre
posted :
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004 17:11:20 GMT, in uk.sci.astronomy , Phil
wrote:


Its only a problem for Windows users. Anyone running a Mac or Linux system
doesnt have to worry about viruses.

Please do NOT distribute such nonsensical suggestions. Even a trivial
websearch proves your error.

It's no doubt true that real viruses for Mac/Linux/etc. do exist and
propagate.

But at present a vast amount of malmail is being generated, aimed at
"more-or-less arbitrary left parts @ somewhere". This particularly
affects those who "own" an E-address set "everything @ somewhere", of
course. Even auto-refusing stuff to unknown left parts takes machine and
link time.

AIUI that class of stuff is only infective on PCs or on Windows PCs; but
it can amount to a DoS attack on anyone.

--
© John Stockton, Surrey, UK. Turnpike v4.00 MIME ©
Web URL:http://www.uwasa.fi/~ts/http/tsfaq.html - Timo Salmi: Usenet Q&A.
Web URL:http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/news-use.htm : about usage of News.
No Encoding. Quotes before replies. Snip well. Write clearly. Don't Mail News.

Dr John Stockton wrote:

It's no doubt true that real viruses for Mac/Linux/etc. do exist and
propagate.

Currently there is one virus for MacOSX, and it's more-or-less a proof
of concept and actually requires you to install it!

Most attacks on Unix systems (and I group MacOSX, FreeBSD and Linux in
this) takes the form of exploits against running services, ie they are
targetted at services running on the host machine (such as Apache)
rather than the OS itself, and there's no 'infection' as such.

But at present a vast amount of malmail is being generated, aimed at
"more-or-less arbitrary left parts @ somewhere". This particularly
affects those who "own" an E-address set "everything @ somewhere", of
course. Even auto-refusing stuff to unknown left parts takes machine and
link time.

AIUI that class of stuff is only infective on PCs or on Windows PCs; but
it can amount to a DoS attack on anyone.

Correct.

A brief extract from my firewall log:

[odin] jim sudo tail -f /var/log/security
Dec 18 05:20:41 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.213:4093
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1
Dec 18 05:20:44 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.213:4093
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1
Dec 18 05:45:59 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.67:3808
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1
Dec 18 05:46:02 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.67:3808
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1
Dec 18 05:59:00 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 211.144.162.199:3249
192.168.2.2:1080 in via ed1
Dec 18 05:59:03 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 211.144.162.199:3249
192.168.2.2:1080 in via ed1
Dec 18 06:08:36 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 217.126.251.47:1091
192.168.2.2:1433 in via ed1
Dec 18 06:08:46 odin last message repeated 2 times
Dec 18 06:13:26 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.67:3462
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1
Dec 18 06:13:29 odin /kernel: ipfw: 65435 Deny TCP 212.159.115.67:3462
192.168.2.2:445 in via ed1

Of those entries, the '445' ones are Windows viruses attempting to
spread, the 1080 one is probably 'WinHole' and the 1433 is someone
trying to connect to a (nonexistant) MS SQL server.

In other words, they're all Windows attacks.

I hate Windows. I really, really do.

Jim
--
Find me at http://www.ursaminorbeta.co.uk AIM/iChatAV: JCAndrew2
If half the software you're running is to protect you from other
software, you're using the wrong operating system.