Date: Wed, 28 Feb 1996 12:35:46 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Jon Loeliger <jdl@jdl.com> Cc: Ravis Tasakorn <gc727305@netserv.chula.ac.th>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Virus checking Message-ID: <3299.825539746@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Feb 1996 12:29:27 CST." <199602281829.MAA06461@chrome.jdl.com>
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[ Oh dear, it's as I thought ] > Jon Loelinger writes: > >>So, like Ravis Tasakorn was saying to me just the other day: >> Dear Users >> >> I'd like to know if any of you have URL of cool sites where I can >> download virus killer shareware programs. >> >> It may be some of these virtual creatures living in my harddisk,Ah! :( >> > > Yes, and they sound somewhat intelligent too. Odd... Only just.. I did think to subject Ravis to a turing test in a short round of private email, and he failed it, so I'd say this is simply another manifestation of the MAILBOMBER virus they've been talking about over on AOL. Yep, MAILBOMBER is one of the more insidious little virii to come out of Eastern Europe. It apparently forges mail from a randomly constructed alias and posts it to a randomly selected mailing list (ours, unfortunately, appearing to be one of compiled-in choices). The topic of the message is, of course, viruses and whether you have any information on them. It then scans the replies it gets to see if the keyword MAILBOMBER appears anywhere, thus cleverly measuring its own levels of notoriety and taking various protective measures when certain thresholds are exceeded. Fortunately, numerous bugs in its natural language output algorithm make it rather easy to catch. It seems that the author wasn't a native speaker of english, and he coded certain linguistic misunderstandings on his part directly into the virus. In short, it may be a highly sophisticated piece of work, but it still speaks terrible english. Hopefully my mention of it 3 times in this message should trigger its response mechanism into fleeing this particular mailing list. Jordan
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