ADMIN: Summary of today's problems

Hello everyone...

Yes, today was a busy today. :-) Three mailing lists (ODTUG-DEV2K-L, ODTUG-DISC2K-L and ORACLE-L) were hit by both a looping vacation message and an attempted virus propagation. As you are aware, I shut down all three lists for most of the day in order to stop these repeating messages from making matters worse for everyone.

1. One user set up a "vacation" auto-responder for his account. This auto-responder is not smart enough to realize when it is looping, nor where to send appropriate responses. As a result, over 175 messages were sent to the mailing list, each one slightly longer than the next.

I have removed the offending user and disabled his ability to post. In addition, the closure of the lists has caused the looping messages to die for lack of a place to go.

As a reminder, please always put your account on NOMAIL mode before you leave for vacation or a trip. ListGuru does a fair job of filtering out looping auto-response messages, but this one snuck through, and you can see the damage it caused. Please E-mail me if you have questions on how to put your account into NOMAIL mode.

2) Another user was infected by the "Emanuel" virus. This virus propagates by sending copies of itself in E-mail messages. Each time the user receives a message, a reply is sent out containing the virus. In normal circumstances, this is a problem. However since ListGuru filters out all binary attachments, NO VIRUS EVER MADE IT TO YOUR MAILBOX. ListGuru leaves the *name* of the attachment alone when the filtering occurs, hence why so many of your virus checkers started screaming when they saw emanuel . exe in the message. The top 10% of the virus checkers go one step further and examine the actual attachment itself. Those that did would find that the real virus did not make it through the list. You should see that the attachment you received was about 150 bytes, whereas the actual virus is 200kb or more. Suffice to say that while it may appear you received a virus, YOU DID NOT.

The offending user has been removed and banned from posting until they can clean the virus from their computer.

Thanks to everyone who sent messages alerting me to these problems as they occur. Don't be shy about letting me know there are problems if you see them. Just E-mail me at 'ListMaster_at_fatcity.com'. I'll be putting up a form on the web where you can send such reports, so stay tuned for that information. Also, you can always check the status of the lists at http://www.fatcity.com.

This mailing list can be used again as of this writing. Received on Mon Jan 22 2001 - 22:20:25 CST