Re: Has SWEN finally died?
On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 05:39:05PM -0700, Paul E Condon wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 04:23:51PM -0500, Marc Shapiro wrote:
> > I opened this hotmail account specifically for posting to this list. This
> > is my fourth post in 2 days. So far, no spam, including no SWEN. Could we
> > finally be seein the end of this mess?
> >
>
> I'm getting one every 2 or 3 hrs. Down from ~5/hr three days ago.
> Theory: If you don't post to this list for many days, the infected machines
> which have your email address in their lists of targets gradually get disinfected,
> and your incoming swen gradually goes to zero. But, if you post, you run the
> risk of a new wave of swen.
>
> Just a theory.
I've only posted rarely, and had a pretty good dose of swen after a post
or two a month ago, now down to about 0. I posted once a few days ago
and got no swen from that. Maybe the address harvesting mechanism is
no longer looking at usenet new-posts (or whatever it was doing)?
The end result is that my filtering (using procmail) is a tad more
complicated and time-consuming, still looking for swen mails, when
apparently the problem is past. The patterns in .procmailrc are
potentially still useful for other MS executables, but in general
this sort of solution is going to add cruft to my mail processing.
I.e., the swen worm attack has a lasting impact, however small.
Ken
--
Ken Irving, Research Analyst, fnkci@uaf.edu, 907-474-6152
Water and Environmental Research Center
Institute of Northern Engineering
University of Alaska, Fairbanks
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