The latest virus

5 Comments

I've been getting a huge amount of virus-laden mail lately, apparently all carrying PE_ZAFI.B. I got 1500 of them the other day, mostly addressed to various randomly generated addresses at hwaet.org, one of the domains I host; since then, there have been bursts of a few hundred at a time, and a burst of 800 in the last 8 hours or so.

I should probably do the same thing for my domains that I set up for Mary Anne's, where all mail to addresses other than the expected ones gets silently discarded. (That would also discard the occasional messages that I get that are intended for someone real, but that were just sent to the wrong address. There's someone out there whose friends and business associates think has a kith.org address. I'd rather not silently discard those, but maybe I'll set those to bounce instead.)

But I like the "any username at kith goes to me" thing, and I hate silently discarding anything. It might be important!

Oh, well. Sometimes sacrifices must be made in the War Against Spam.

5 Responses to “The latest virus”

  1. Jay Lake

    I recently had to do the same thing for jlake.com and jaylake.com, for the same reasons. I’ve been (whatever)@ for years, but the spam/virus guys finally defeated me through sheer volume.

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  2. Simon Owens

    Well, we’ve lost one of the battles in that war. Did you hear about the Supreme Court’s decision that they won’t be making a list for us to join that will in turn block spam?

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  3. Michael

    It was the FTC, not the Supreme Court. That’s one of those funny asymmetric relationships where only one side thinks of it as asymmetric.

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  4. irilyth

    …and it’s not at all clear that a do-not-spam list would have any effect at all, given that spam is already entirely illegal. This is unlike telemarketing, which was and is legal, so the do-not-call list forced legally-operating telemarketers to respect it or face punishment. Spammers are already breaking Federal laws, and are thus unlikely to pay any attention to more new laws.

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  5. Shmuel

    Yep. The FTC reasoned that a do-not-spam list would be more likely to be used by spammers as a list of people to spam than to serve its intended purpose, and that what’s really needed here is a way of preventing spoofing. Suprisingly enough for a federal agency dealing with technology, I think they got it exactly right.

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