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PC 'virus' rebounds on Mac users

srobert

srobert

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 7, 2002
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—>_Link to the article <—

They had to pull us under the bus with them... Makes you wonder why they'd even write the thing for a PC website.

MyDoom PC 'virus' rebounds on Mac users
(PC Pro) 13:12

The first big worm attack of 2004 is spreading fast throughout the world today. The MyDoom worm, which is a variant of the Mimail virus, spreads via email or to any available shared directories used by Kazaa.

Of course, the worm can only affect Windows machines, but because of the way it behaves Mac users may soon find their inboxes filling with emails returned as undeliverable from unrecognised addresses.

The worm harvests email addresses from a PC user's hard disk and then generatees randomly-chosen addresses for both the 'to' and 'from' fields. This means that the 'from' address is spoofed and does not tell the next victim where the mail came from. If - as is almost certain - a Windows user has your email address in their address book then you could be affected.

According to security firm Sophos, the backdoor access has been designed to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack against SCO, a company that has made itself hugely unpopular in the Linux community by claiming it owns the rights to parts of the Linux code.

By midnight, MessageLabs estimated that it had intercepted some 165,000 copies of the worm yet was still spreading rapidly.

Steve Malone and Simon Aughton
Click to expand...
 
Viruii

As long as it doesn't do something to my mac, it can go ahead and fill up my inbox. I know it can be alot, but as long as I have no down time, I could careless. Ok, I do care, because I'm a PC techy at my school, looks like I will be doing lots of work today, Damn.
 
I know what this means!

We here at Northwest Missouri State University are the electronic campus. Every dorm room has a desktop Gateway PC. Campus network will be going down in a few days once this virus embeds itself deeply into the core. Once the 'antidote' is developed, they'll spend a few days wiping and reformatting every campus hard drive before they open us back up to the internet.

That'll make 4 times since September! I was talking to a techie about how bad Blaster infected us, and he said that the Blaster virus was, at its peak, consuming twice the bandwidth that all the students on campus were.

Glad I's gots me Apple PBook!!
 
Re: PC 'virus' rebounds on Mac users

it is a bit strange to isolate and just mention Macs, as if the email inboxes being filled up with bounces is an isolated problem for Mac (it isn't) or the fault of the Mac (it isn't).

he should have written:

Of course, the worm can only affect Windows machines, but because of the way it behaves anyone with an email account may soon find their inboxes filling with emails returned as undeliverable from unrecognised addresses.
Click to expand...

:rolleyes:
 
Of course it just a sad attempt to drag Macs into the mess. Negative publicity.
They could have said Macs are immune except for full inboxes - but no.
One of my PC friends said me an email warning me about this virus. I sent a reply saying Ha Ha I've still got a Mac (my 4th).

Ironically my work want to swap to PCs (we are probably the largest user of Macs in the UK). It was nice to see an email saying that the PCs with us have been contaminated and its rather nasty.

My friends PC checks for updates and virusssss (viri/vira) every 30 minutes, I just glad he's using that processing power to do something.
 
Mentioning Macs specifically was very misleading. However, this should be a wake up call for Apple to build in multiple layers of security into all of their applications and OSX.

First, the worm should have been detected by antivirus services protecting Mail. Second, the OS should have detected the suspicious activity. Failing that the worm should have been detected when trying to send outgoing email. At each stage the malicious code should have been detected, isolated, and removed.

I am curious to know if those few Macs running Antivirus software such as Virex or Norton were able to catch this one.
 
If you briefly put Mail in "Training" mode for junk mail, you can quickly "teach" it to filter out the virus messages as Junk. Of course it still has to download them all, but it's better than having to sift through all of them to find your *real* mail.
 
Originally posted by coolsoldier
If you briefly put Mail in "Training" mode for junk mail, you can quickly "teach" it to filter out the virus messages as Junk. Of course it still has to download them all, but it's better than having to sift through all of them to find your *real* mail.
Click to expand...

Mail's junk filter continues to learn once its enabled and not in training mode. So if you have filtering enabled, just mark all crap as junk and mail should take care of it.
 
Originally posted by Thirteenva
Mail's junk filter continues to learn once its enabled and not in training mode. So if you have filtering enabled, just mark all crap as junk and mail should take care of it.
Click to expand...

I did not know that.
What then is the point of having a training mode at all?
 
Originally posted by coolsoldier
I did not know that.
What then is the point of having a training mode at all?
Click to expand...

Training mode will not move any emails to the Junk folder, it will leave them in your inbox, marked as Junk. It's mostly for those first couple of weeks when the filter is hugely affected by whatever you consider "junk". after a month or so, when you're confident that it's no longer "junking" your legitimate emails, you switch to normal mode, and it moves things to Junk.

basically, it's to keep idiots from ignoring the few mistakes that the filter makes in the beginning :)

paul
 
I just got on my computer this evening and wow, I must a met a lot of new friends today. I got over 80 e-mails with this virus. When I signed up with our DSL carrier, I stupidly choose an easy to remember e-mail address (brian@xxxxxxx.net). It must sent out an e-mail to common first names @ whatever dot com or net.

Of course, the idiots at the DSL provider didn't think to put a filter to catch these things.
 
Originally posted by Chappers

Ironically my work want to swap to PCs (we are probably the largest user of Macs in the UK). It was nice to see an email saying that the PCs with us have been contaminated and its rather nasty.
Click to expand...

I'm intrigued. Are you able to tell me which organisation that is?
 
V-filters, good or bad?

Originally posted by bbarnhart
I just got on my computer this evening and wow, I must a met a lot of new friends today. I got over 80 e-mails with this virus. When I signed up with our DSL carrier, I stupidly choose an easy to remember e-mail address (brian@xxxxxxx.net). It must sent out an e-mail to common first names @ whatever dot com or net.

Of course, the idiots at the DSL provider didn't think to put a filter to catch these things.
Click to expand...

My provider (XS4all.nl) has very effective virusfilters: normally I get between 20 and 40 mails (apart from spam) a day, but today thus far only 3.

Too effective maybe? I wonder if I miss some free lance e-work which is regularly mailed to me. Do I have to check now with every possible employer if they (failed to) send me something these days?
 
I personally am having problems communicating with anyone by email right now. Between out-of-commission networks and flooded inboxes, a lot of people seem to just be avoiding email completely.
 
Cambridge University. Mac all over the place. The computer lab has a mac lab (aptly named "The Macintosh Laboratory"). There is however that horrible decline that I talked about.
 
I hear out network has it pretty bad, too. The entire system is handled be Dell using XP Pro. Fortunately, I don't use my school's email and I am on my PowerBook, so I am quite content at the moment. This is probably the fourth time something has caused a major problem with the network, but at least it isn't as bad as last semester with all those attacks that happened one after the other. Our network was down more often than it was up and so many people had infections that the school had to spend a great deal of money securing licensing rights to Norton Antivirus so that everyone on campus could pick up a free antivirus subscription. Unfortunately, though, I hear there will be yet another increase in room and boarding fees next semester to make up for it.
 
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