Oooh, it's SoBig
I generally have a low opinion of my fellow human beings. 33 years of near-constant reenforcement demonstrating human stupidity has had a deleterious effect on my ability to presume that other people are smart or even sparked wtih the slightest self-awareness: From the warnings printed on foam fast-food restaurant coffee cups instructing me not to pour the contents therein into my crotch to the advertisements on television pitching a purple-pilled acid reflux medication to people who claim they "didn't know" that their constant need to swallow their own bile and vomit might be a sign of a gastrointestinal disorder requiring some form of treatment.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the spread of SoBig.F, the Windows worm that, once activated, spoofs e-mail addresses and spreads far and wide. This is, by far, the worst attack I've ever seen. Since last night, we've had to clear thousands of messages from our e-mail server accordingly. Many virus protection developers have already been able to provide innoculations for their customers, but that hasn't stopped the spread of the worm at all -- it continues unabated, and in the last fw hours I've seen hundreds more examples of infected e-mails.
Which leads me back to stupidity. The person who created this is not stupid, obviously, although they're demonstrating a strong trend towards sociopathy and should probably be prevented from ever using a computer again. No, the stupid people are the frickin' MORON Windows users who continue to OPEN ATTACHMENTS in their E-MAILS from PEOPLE they don't KNOW. For god's sake, leave it alone. Or better yet, buy a Mac.
Comments
Along the lines of proving that humans are basically stupid... Take a look at the cardboard FedEx letter mailer sometime. Key word being "cardboard." You're warned not to ship blood. Which means that some asshat did it at some point and sued FedEx for not telling him he shouldn't. Why he was shipping blood in the first place...
And that MORON windows user would be my boss. *sigh*
Posted by: lyssa | August 21, 2003 01:18 AM
SoBig.F has infected my Mac. As far as I've been able to study this, Symantec doesn't believe that it does this, or they don't have a fix for it. Does anyone know how to kill this thing? 275 messages this morning...
Posted by: Brenda Shea | August 21, 2003 08:42 AM
I honestly don't think that SoBig.F has infected your Mac, unless you've installed VirtualPC or another PC emulator -- it could have infected your e-mail app on *that*.
Posted by: Peter Cohen | August 21, 2003 08:58 AM
Lyssa:
Could be worse. Your boss could be the blood guy.
Posted by: Peter Cohen | August 21, 2003 09:07 AM
If you have a computer infected with SoBig, it means you're sending out hundreds of spam e-mails. However, if you're just a regular schmoe with an e-mail address that is in someone's address book or on a web page that happens to be in that person's internet cache files, and that someone has SoBig, you're going to be on the receiving end of a ton of e-mail, some of it even claiming to be from you in the first place because of the way SoBig forges the "From" headers. This is something that is pretty much unavoidable no matter what computer you use.
Posted by: Brad Oliver | August 21, 2003 05:46 PM
I also have a mac and was pleasantly suprised to have received 76 emails all of which seemed to think I had created them. After searching the net for hours last night I became firmly convinced that sobig f was not smart enough to have figured out how to work on my mac. I am glad that there are other mac users who have had this same problem.
Posted by: Anonymous | August 22, 2003 02:51 PM