The Windows-using fuckwits are at it again.

[reddragdiva]

How many copies of the latest fucking virus are in my fucking mail? TOO FUCKING MANY. With a new one on average every one hundred and fifty seconds for the past three days! I think the Bayesian filter is this close to deciding the word 'Microsoft' indicates spam.

Your excuses are tired. The bogus analogies, the belligerent whininess. You talk like junkies in danger of being cut off. YOUR COMPUTERS ARE AGENTS OF CONTAGION. THEY DESERVE TO BE BANISHED FROM THE NET FORTHWITH. I wish to declare my full and ardent support for this move. People who complain this is unfaaair and toooo haaard are like people who run over kids and whose only defence is that they can't be expected to know how to drive and therefore couldn't possibly be held responsible.

I fully expect the comments on this entry to be filled with lame justifications, ridiculous analogies and badly-misremembered Microsoft FUD. Don't whine to me for daring to complain about your intrinsically unsecurable systems - just CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELVES AND YOUR COMPATRIOTS, YOU SKANKY SHITBAGS.

(Thunderbird seems to detect the web page variant of the virus, but not the mailbounce one - it doesn't like running slabs of MIME-encoded binary through the filter. Filter on the string TVqQAAMAAAAEAAAA// - that's the beginning of the virus code, and will nail it nicely.)

Note: I expect things to be even worse when popular Linux is afflicted with self-propagating rootkits. For the same reason.

Comments

[reddragdiva]

I had eighty-two megabytes of this crap last night. I deleted a pile directly off the spool this morning, so they won't be counted toward my final total.

My fun[at]thingy.apana.org.au address has been all across the net for the past six years, so I get a comprehensive view of this sort of thing.

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Yes, and my cix account has been all over the place for over 15 years. I'm getting thousands of copies of this crap, and yes, it's irritating me greatly, but I still maintain that if everyone switched to Linux or Mac then within weeks we'd be back in the same situation.

The only solution is to track down the people that don't take precuations, burn their houses down, and cut their goolies off.

[reddragdiva]

It depends - email viruses were pretty much invented by Microsoft adding the capability to Outlook and OE. I remember being on an antivirus helpdesk in late 1999 and actually being able to tell callers with complete confidence, "There is NO SUCH THING as an email that automatically runs programs." Thanks, Bill. 'Email virus' still means 'Microsoft virus' - other email clients don't actually run code by default.

Check the COM article - Windows is structurally different from Unix and has more almost-unsolvable problems because of it.

That said, the r00tkitability of stock Red Hat releases is legendary. And the problem will be worse, because, even though far less machines will be susceptible to infection, one can wreak so much more havoc with an 0wn3d Unix box.

Monoculture in general is bad. Standardise protocols, not implementations! I'm hoping the extremely dynamic nature of Unix at present will mitigate the likelihood of a monoculture emerging. However, Root Hat is likely to be The Corporate Standard. 'Cos it is now. Why write to the LSB when you can write to a specific Red Hat point release? Bah.

Of course, for the serious about security ...

[giolla.livejournal.com]

Oddly my main address doesn't seem to get much of this stuff at all and it's only just started getting spam. Despite being on the web and in news for I think about 8 years now.