Clueless anti-virus products/vendors (was Re: Sober)

From: Daniel Senie (no email)
Date: Fri Dec 02 2005 - 15:27:16 EST

  • Next message: Larry Smith: "Re: Clueless anti-virus products/vendors (was Re: Sober)"

    At 03:12 PM 12/2/2005, Michael Loftis wrote:

    >--On December 2, 2005 2:02:15 PM -0600 Dennis Dayman
    ><> wrote:
    >
    >>
    >>Interested, but I see many Sober postings and outages on other lists and
    >>not here...has anyone been having issues? I know the ISP's are fighting
    >>the living out of the virus.
    >
    >I've been seeing a few really large bursts into our mailserver. Not
    >sure if it's a new variant or a reoccurrence of an old strain. I
    >put in a good number of new port 25 inbound blocks for infected
    >systems and attempted to put up a few checks inside of our front end
    >mail servers rather than in the virus and spam filtering (which
    >happens later for us, so for bad surges we put a few custom rules up
    >front early in postfix).

    Only stuff we're seeing is a lot of blowback from dumb mail systems
    that accept email, THEN scan for viruses, and ultimately decide to
    send a note back to the From: address in the body of the infected
    email. Since the From: is invariably forged, the uninvolved owner of
    those forged email addresses gets hammered.

    Can people building virus scanning devices PLEASE GET A %^&*^ CLUE?
    This means you, Barricuda Networks, more than anyone else, but we
    also see this annoyance from Symantec devices, and from some AOL
    systems as well.

    Blasting a note back does two things:

    1. It allows the worm or virus author an opportunity to implement an
    amplified attack on a third party using your filtering systems.

    2. The bounce messages mostly include an advertisement for the
    filtering box's vendor. Get a clue... this is a REALLY negative
    advertisement for your spam & virus filtering technology. If you
    can't manage to realize the virus laden email should perhaps be
    dropped, then it makes your box look poorly designed.

    Oh, and please delete the infected file rather than sending that along too.

    OK, off my soapbox.

    Dan


  • Next message: Larry Smith: "Re: Clueless anti-virus products/vendors (was Re: Sober)"





    Hosted Email Solutions

    Invaluement Anti-Spam DNSBLs



    Powered By FreeBSD   Powered By FreeBSD