Re: OT: HEADS-UP: viral storm out there

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, ron.l.johnson@cox.net (Ron Johnson) belched out...:
> On Fri, 2003-09-19 at 17:16, Christopher Browne wrote:
>> Nikola.Milutinovic@ev.co.yu ("Nikola Milutinovic") writes:
>> > This is off topic and is a cross-post, so I'll be brief. There is a
>> > very nasty virus out there and I urge everybody to get their AV in
>> > order. The virus is known as: "W32.Gibe-F" or "W32.Swen-A".
>>
>> CERT has a report on it (if the URL resolves :-().
>>
>> http://www.cert.org/current/current_activity.html#swena
>>
>> I have been receiving _thousands_ of these today, and others are
>> reporting similar.  It's as bad for us not running W32 as it is for
>> those that are...
>
> Except they can get infected.

No, it can be worse for "us" that aren't infected, because our systems
are a little more robust so that instead of falling over due to the
load, we wind up actually receiving all the messages, which is a
further problem.

In the end (and we're not exactly at the "end" yet), I wound up
receiving about 1500 of the messages, which, after I punted them into
my ~/Mail/deleted path, and cpio'ed and gzipped them, turned into
about 80MB of compressed material, corresponding to probably 170MB of
data.  (Yes, I'll purge it.)

My systems didn't go down, but 170MB of bandwidth got eaten.  I'm just
lucky that my ISP has recently moved over to a "we don't charge for
overuse of bandwidth" policy.  There used to be a fee for going over a
certain "cap."
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