As most of you know there is an epidemic of worms going
around the internet at the current time. Most of them work by discovering
email addresses from the address book and other locations on the infected
machine. The mail that is then sent to replicate itself uses selected
email addresses found as the From: header and sent to other addresses
found. This produces a bit of social engineering in that the mail often
appears to come from someone you know.
Unfortunately, s-news seems to be well known on the infected
machines. One impact of this is that you may receive the worm in an email
that you think has come from s-news. Hundreds of copies of the worm have
been submitted for posting to s-news. Thankfully our mailing list
software (MajorDomo II) has caught almost all of them – but it requires
me to look at the email and reject it. I am unable to continue to spend the
time to do this, so later today we will start rejecting out-of hand-submissions
from those who are not subscribed to the list. I am sorry to do that, but
it is the only sane way to respond to the current situation.
As a reminder, please, never, never open an attachment
unless you are certain that it is not infected. The current batch are
frequently hidden within .zip files, but other types have been used as
well. Also be certain that your antivirus software is up-to-date.
-phil
J.
Philip Miller, Professor of Biostatistics
Washington University School of Medicine
Director of Biostatistics Core, Siteman Cancer Center
Mail: Campus Box 8067, 660 S. Euclid Ave
St. Louis, MO 63110
Physical Address: 3349 Barnard
Phone: 314-362-3617, 314-362-3728 (fax)
email: jphilipmiller@wubios.wustl.edu
web: http://www.biostat.wustl.edu/~phil
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