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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Odd spam / virus - comments ?
On Tue, 26 Mar 2002 09:13:08 EST, "Steven M. Bellovin" said: > There are worms out there (such as Nimda.E) that use Outlook address books > not just for lists of victims, but also as "From:" addresses. In other > words, your involvement might be having sent email to someone else who > is infected. An important addendum here - "having sent mail" includes posting to a mailing list that has a subscriber. I've gotten a lot of complaints because the actual perpetrator was a subscriber to NANOG or IETF or one of the many SecurityFocus mailing lists I post to. And once you take the union of *all* those lists, you start hitting the "birthday paradox" - it becomes *very* likely that if you and the recipient know each other (by virtue of being in the computer industry) that a third party has seen mail from both of you. Another way to look at it is that the "6 degrees" game can easily drop 2 or 3 degrees *really* fast if you allow "A and B both subscribe to the same mailing list" as a connection. -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech Attachment:
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