On Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:10:22 -0700, Jim Kelley
wrote:


I run a firewall on my desktop system so I can see what's happening on
both sides of the ethernet card. My system is not infected. FYI
there's a free utility called stinger that can be used to scan for these
worms. Nevertheless, the inbox on the unix system that handles my email
has accumulated about 100 of these kind of messages a day since last
Tuesday or so. I have my desktop system set to filter them.

http://grc.com/default.htm
has offered a port scanner for years. Also a Trojan Horse detector.

But if you are trying to say that the author(s) of the viruses are
specifically targeting users with a MS notation in their news header,
then you may be right. But you didn't say that.

73, Jim AC6XG

Hi Jim,

I find it somewhat beyond the bounds of belief that some one
individual, or consortium of individuals are sitting at home and
directing attacks at selected accounts. The only vector of success is
found in an OS that supports this for them.

Look at who's complaining of massive attacks, and with the exception
of Mike, whose posting activity is highly correlatable, and the rest,
who are not; then those who are not are highly correlatable to what
they commonly use. The evidence is overwhelmingly MS oriented, and
not through force of numbers simply because MS dominates the market.

For a simple example of that contradiction is my own situation. I run
Win2000 and I do not use MS internet software. For this entire day
I've gotten 5 emails from folks reading my comments and two that went
to the trash can for transgressing my filters. It is quite obvious to
me that suggestions that the newsgroups are being harvested is not
applicable to this one (rraa), nor the dozen odd others I participate
in. I can easily imagine it may be confined to a few newsgroups, and
through those few, the stream cascades by virtue of poor security
management by those naive enough to use MS software and just let
things ride.

This conflagration would die of lack of combustibles otherwise. This
is classic symptomatology.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC