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Thursday, August 21, 2003

 

The Rapes of Grath  

An open letter to one of the better known techno-geek keyboard jockies:

Okay, okay, his name is Steve Bass, who was commenting on the recent rash of crap floating around the net in the wake of the Blaster worm...

The Annoyer this time is a semi-average computer user who just won't believe that anything he's connected to could be used in propagating a virus. Let's set the stage: last week I received a letter purporting to come from this individual. It wasn't, really. It was sent to me by the W32.klez.H virus and came with a fresh copy attached, all ready to mess with MY system. Norton took one look and screamed, loudly, while it was wiping out the bugger.

Now, I could have just ignored the thing, as you may have. Especially if I got as many attacks as you do, but this was my first go-round. So, I fired off a letter to the ISP that held the originating point of the mail and another to the individual whose system appears to be compromised. I say 'appears' instead of 'appeared', because this moron refuses to believe that any system he has anything to do with could be infected. Now, if I am to believe that Norton would kick up a fuss about a false positive, then I could ignore it, but it was very obviously not a letter this person would have written. In fact, there was no text in the main message at all. Well, all I got for my good citizenry was a return letter from this putz saying "I ran all kinds of virus checks and my system is clean".

This person runs part of a club devoted to popup camper owners. It's hosted on Earthlink. If we're to believe that Earthlink's system is infected, then I suppose the virus could have got my e-mail address from there, but I really suspect that the offending letter actually did come from the person whose e-mail address appeared in the 'From' column.

The bottom line is that the club lost a member. I set OE to delete all letters claiming to come from this guy from the server before downloading. I'm like the man who refuses to stand in the middle of the road because he's learned that, no matter what the lines on the pavement say, it's NOT a safe place to be.

Sometimes ya just can't win...

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