Tikkabik

So we ran a story today about the spread of a new Windows e-mail worm called SoBig.F. The worm replicates itself and sends out file attachments using spoofed e-mail address it culls from an infected host's address book.

One reader asked -- rhetorically, judging from the "no message" tag he stuck on the end of his subject line -- how this affects his Mac. Well, it doesn't, at least not directly.

Unless, of course, your e-mail address has ever been used by a Windows PC user who might have contracted this worm.

For me, it's meant about two hours in wasted productivity -- first tracking down the source of the problem and reporting it to our IT director, then creating an e-mail client rule that automatically trashes any file that manages to get through our server that's related.

Before noon, my boss had already counted more than 900 SoBig.F-related e-mails. If anything, the pace picked up after lunch.

What's almost as bad as SoBig.F is the e-mail servers' responses to it -- which is to send another message back to let users know that they've been infected. But since SoBig.F spoofs the sending e-mail address, that's basically a waste of time, since the sender is very rarely if ever the offending party.

I'd cleaned up before I broke for dinner. A couple of hours later, I had another couple hundred messages in my e-mail client that were SoBig.F related.