From owner-freebsd-security Mon Oct 29 15: 7: 2 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-security@freebsd.org Received: from R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu (R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu [128.111.181.172]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E236C37B401 for ; Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:06:59 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (mudman@localhost) by R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id f9TN9Xa16148; Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:09:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from mudman@R181172.resnet.ucsb.edu) Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 15:09:32 -0800 (PST) From: Dave To: Brandon Harper Cc: Subject: RE: AntiVirus Replies [was: VIRUS IN YOUR MAIL] In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-security@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > > it would be a good thing for somebody to be able to DoS a list by > > sending a little virus and firing off 250 autoresponders? > > [snip] > 2.) E-mail has very small performance hit. I won't really elaborate on this > one since its rather obvious. I've worked on some RedHat boxes that weren't > anything terribly special handling 100+ messages (both incoming and There is a performance hit that is latent that you are not looking at. Since most of us are computer people, we get into the habit of analyzing efficiency issues with *computers*. But what about all the human time spent deleting all those autoresponses? Although it was pointed out that not *everyone* is using auto-responders, if we assume the list was large enough that any given small percentage of subscribers have scanners, would could presumabably get the proverbial 250 auto-responders going off. (And if you just won't believe it, we may assume the virus sender may cc every list available on FreeBSD.org, from freebsd-questions to hardware to security. Many of us subscribe to more than one list, and presumably, some autoresponding machines as well) If you are lucky enough to not being using a GUI like a Yahoo! mail account, you can probably delete their mess pretty fast (esp in Pine). But then we have to ask ourselves, do we just want to hold down the delete-key for 250 seconds everytime some joker wants to drop a virus off to a list? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-security" in the body of the message