[OT] Torrent of Swen

insecure insecure
Tue Oct 7 13:40:30 PDT 2003


Hi guys.

This is horribly offtopic. But all those Swens 150k each are offtopic
in my inbox, too. Unfortunately I have no control whatsoever over mail.od.ua
host, I cannot install antivirus there, and link is neither fast nor
completely free of charge. Downloading several _tens of megabytes_
of junk each day is not much fun.

What's interesting is that 99% of my mails from this account are
sent to Linux-centric mailing lists, so how come it receives so much Swens,
more than my business mailbox? Swen can only come from Windoze box,
and mostly from Outlook users due to *exceptionally* moronic level
of virus protection in that mailer.

So I took a liberty and took a survey of my maildirs (thanks Bernstein
(or whoever) for maildir, mailbox format is bad idea really...):

outpook.sh
==========
for a in *; do
    if test -d "$a"; then
        mails=`ls -1 -R "$a/cur" | wc -l`
        outpook=`cat "$a"/cur/* 2>/dev/null | grep -c '^X-Mailer: .*Outlook'`
        if test "$mails" -gt 0; then
            echo "$a:" $((outpook*100/mails))"%"
        else
            echo "$a: empty"
        fi
    fi
done

# sh outpook.sh
autoconf: 5%
cipe: 0%
cr.yp.to: 17%
glibc: 0%
hostap: 16%  <--- yes some hostap folks use it :(
kde: 0%
lkml: 0%
oo: 8%
qmail: 14%
squid: 19%
tinyutils: 5%

And God knows how many Outlook-using readers of those lists never posted,
and hence not seen...

Hey Outlook'ers!

May I suggest:
1) Quick check for Swen infection (try to run regedit. if it fails, you
   are infected)
2) Consider using something less broken than Outlook. For example,
   Mozilla/Thunderbird is completely free and sufficiently mature.
-- 
vda




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