[clug] [AUSCERT ALERT - Email worm W32.Beagle.A/Win32.Bagle.A]

Michael Still mikal at stillhq.com
Mon Jan 19 09:55:38 GMT 2004


On Mon, 19 Jan 2004, Damien Elmes wrote:

> Nemo -earth native- <nemo at nut.house.cx> writes:
> 
> > Back to the original point, there is also an element of selfishness I
> > admit. If someone is going to be annoyed by either a bounce or a
> > notification, then since (imho) most of these are worms, it's better to
> > not annoy my paying customers.
> 
> And instead annoy random people on the internet! I can appreciate the
> desire to please the customers over strangers, but this has to be
> balanced against the impact on the global community.

No. I disagree. My email is for me. I you send me an .exe, then I'll 
block it... It's just like my overly full inbox or spam filtering 
policies -- email is for _my_ convenience (I'm the one paying for it).

To me it's kinda like my phone. If I don't answer, it's simply possibily 
because I refuse to live my life dictated by someone else's timings. Leave 
a message after the tone, or fund my connectivity.

> > More pragmatically, if we notified the recipient on every catch, then
> > they'd have to manually contact the sender to send it through via a
> > loophole anyways - by rejecting back to the sender, we've automatically
> > done the customers job for them on 'real' attachments.
> 
> But the sender may be wary of taking action based on advice from an
> automated system. And your system prevents the recipient from ever
> being aware of the missed mail (to "not annoy them"), and this could
> prove to be a big problem if they're waiting for a particular message
> and time is of the essence.

I don't want mail from stupid people though. Also, Nemo forgot to mention 
that the blocking is in the form of a 5xx error message (if I recall 
correctly). The sender does't get an email at all.
 
> Your approach certainly saves the customer time, but whether this
> leads to a happier customer is not clear cut. Some customers would
> prefer a reminder that they are protected from the nasties of the
> internet, and would not want to move to a system where they could be
> unaware of emails which had been sent to them.

When worms send me thousands of emails, I don't want thousands of emails. 
Even if they're emails telling me about the email I didn't get.

Mikal

-- 

Michael Still (mikal at stillhq.com) | "All my life I've had one dream,
http://www.stillhq.com            |  to achieve my many goals"
UTC + 11                          |    -- Homer Simpson



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