[extropy-chat] META: viral spam

Robert J. Bradbury bradbury at aeiveos.com
Tue Apr 6 18:48:52 UTC 2004


Note, all messages sent by someone not subscribed to the list
have to be approved by one of the moderators.  So this catches
most of the SPAM (and creates a lot of work for people such
as Dave McFadzean and myself).  [At the next Extro or
transhumanist conference *everyone* on the list should
offer to buy Dave a beer or pool your resources and buy
him dinner as he deals with much of this.]

It seems possible that someone could figure out how to
actually "join" the list.  As we are using a standard
list management package it is probably only a matter of
time before the hackers figure out a way to automate this
process (which is going to make things really difficult).
So the message could come from a newly subscribed member
that we haven't kicked off for sending SPAM.

The other possibility is that an already subscribed member
has a machine that has been corrupted by a virus and has
the ExI list address in their mailbox.  I suspect that is
probably what happened here.  The machine got corrupted
and then attempted to email the virus to the list.

Everyone should consider that there is some minimal size
required for any kind of sophisticated virus.  The ones
going around now are running from 30-45K bytes.  People on
the ExI list *rarely* write messages that are 30-45K in size
(2-5K is more typical).  If a message has any substantial
size it is probably not a good idea to even look at it
unless you *really* believe you can trust the sender.
Perhaps send a message to the sender asking them to confirm
that they sent a message that large to the list.

If I'm interpreting things correctly the source of the message
with the problem appears below.

Robert

> Received: from lists.extropy.org (adsl-67-38-1-7.dsl.sfldmi.ameritech.net
>         [67.38.1.7])
> 	by tick.javien.com (8.11.6/8.11.2) with ESMTP id i36Cibc29830
> 	for <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>; Tue, 6 Apr 2004 06:44:38 -0600




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