Autoresponders And Challenge Response Make Virus Worse

from the making-life-worse dept

Like so many others who have fairly public email addresses, I've been getting absolutely slammed by the SoBig virus. While I almost never get virus emails, the variation on the latest version means that anyone who has a well-publicized email address is getting inundated. Previous versions simply went through Outlook addressbooks and sent the virus on (while also attaching another email address on as the return address). This version also looks through the victim's cached webpages, so any email address found on websites that many people visit have discovered that their getting hundreds or thousands of virus emails. Making matters even worse are the numbers of bounces and autoresponders. It's actually quite similar to what happened when I became an unintentional spammer when a spammer spoofed my email address as the reply-to on his spam messages. One thing that's different, this time, though, is that along with all the usual bounces, I'm getting an annoying amount of "challenge-response" requests from people I didn't email. In other words, the virus emails someone randomly and puts my email address as the "reply-to". If the recipient is using challenge-response, then the challenge gets sent out to me, adding to my own pain (and, initially, confusion). Yet another example of how challenge-response is a "solution" that makes things worse, not better. Luckily my three levels of spam protection seem to be filtering out every one of the virus spams, but it's still quite a pain.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  1. identicon
    Tony Lawrence, 20 Aug 2003 @ 2:09pm

    AutoResponders and Challenges

    I'm also "popular" by virtue of being well known in the tech circles I move in, having a large public web site, and having been "on the net" since '91.
    I'm getting hundreds of these every hour (and of course just trashing them automatically before they leave my server), and like you I'm also getting dozens and dozens of responses from vacation programs and virus filters.
    I can deal with all that junk programmatically, but the part that is most frustrating is the people who do not understand that I am not sending these! They write to me, telling me to stop. Sometimes they are reasonably pleasant ("something seems to be wrong with your machine"), but more often they are angry - VERY angry. Of course I try to write back to explain what is really happening, but by that time they have figured out how to filter out anything that says it is from me, so they probably go on thinking that I'm a class A jerk and ought to be banned from the Web.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    ayoun, 24 Oct 2003 @ 9:30am

    Re: AutoResponders and Challenges

    may I learn to you ......

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    ryan, 2 Mar 2004 @ 2:04am

    hi

    i want to know how to make virus

    pls give me the information

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    moha, 14 May 2006 @ 4:33pm

    can anybody help me how to make a virus email me at moha929@hotmail.com then say virus your subject ok tnx

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    win htun, 9 Feb 2007 @ 6:05am

    how to creat virus file

    I want to known about the virus & how to create it
    and than which programming language to used
    Can I create with Turbo C++ 3.0?
    Please reply me at ngapwagyi@gmail.com

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Neilven Ching, 3 Sep 2007 @ 1:53am

    Virus

    I would like to make a virus using c++.
    Can you teach me to creat one?

    Kindly reply me at wizard_property@yahoo.com

    Thanks...


    I am a student of Computer Programming Course

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Cutepig, 27 Sep 2007 @ 10:55pm

    can you teach me how to make virus?!!??

    i really wan learn!! because....

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    dariniv, 2 Oct 2007 @ 2:25pm

    c++

    making virus in c

    link to this | view in thread ]

  9. identicon
    radhey choudhari, 11 Apr 2008 @ 6:55am

    about making virus

    show me making an virus using c++

    link to this | view in thread ]

  10. identicon
    rishad, 19 Nov 2008 @ 3:59am

    make virus

    link to this | view in thread ]

  11. identicon
    Thomas, 24 Feb 2010 @ 6:36am

    Ahh..I remember this bug. I never dd get hit by it though because I am insanely diligent about keeping my email off of mailing lists and away from crawlers. I don't know if it is the Gmail filters or my antivirus program, but I have not received any even remotely worrisome emails in my inbox for a very long time.

    link to this | view in thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.