Posts Tagged technology

I just thought of something. Outside of corporations and businesses people are often quite lazy about keeping their environments up to date in terms of virus definitions and mending other vulnerabilities. For viruses like the ones affecting me at the moment, a mail virus, this situation can be different using the anti-Spam analogy.

Take SpamNet , an internet based anti-spamadd-on for Outlook for instance. Identifying mails as spam is as easy as a click of the mouse. After that, mails with that particular signature will be automatically handled by the add-on. This is an easy and effective approach to stemming the incessantly larger flow of spam. To knowmore about this topic read the excellent article by Rian Stockbower.

Taking this approach to combat email viruses can yield effective results. Users would identify incomming mails as viri and they would then be handled further by the agent. Futher mails comming in would be automatically handled leaving the user free of the hassle.

Mind you though that I would advise no one to use an anti-spam tool to combat viruses. The the engine keeping the signatures needs to be modified to accomodate viri rather than spam. If you were to use the anti-spam tool to combat viruses you might end up with particular contacts being automatically blocked. We wouldn’t want that happening now would we. :-)

24 hours later I’m still looking at a steady flow of mails comming in. The chime of Outlook keeps me faintly entertained. Meanwhile I’ve resorted to filtering my mails by using the description found on VirusAlert. This will go a long way in stemming the flow (even if some genuine items may get deleted along the way).

They’re a funny thing these viruses. They effectively pull a DoS you and in some respects they succeed. Many people around me - mostly the less tech savvy ones - moan about the time it takes just to find the “real” mails.

Here’s my approach to dealing with these mischievious little things spread over email:

• Find the description of the Virus. Usually this will include the various subjects the mail uses to entice you into opening them.
• Open your mail application and use the filtering functionality to check incomming mails against the list of headers you got earlier. What you do with the mails depends on what you want. You could quarantine the mail by sticking it into a particular folder or just trash it.

You should of course update your virus definitions if you have an antivirus. Depending on wether it’s integrated to your mail application this may or may not be of any help in stemming the flow of mails.

At around 11 this morning I got my first glimpse of the latest viral infection doing the rounds: Sobig.F. The virus propagates by mass-mailing copies of itself using email addresses collected from your local machine. To make it more fun the virus sometimes even spoofs the ‘From’ field in the mail. None of this is new. The technique has been tried and tested before. Still, I’m amazed by the simple, yet elegant efficiency of it all.

By 5PM I was getting 45 mails an hour either with the virus itself of from the corporate firewall informing me that it had cleaned a mail, a recipient could not be found or a child had died (whatever that means). I wonder what it will look like when I walk into the office tomorrow morning…

I’ve just had a whacky idea. Imagine a blogging tool that would check its own logs roughly a year back every time you post a new blog. It would try to match keywords from your current blog with blogs from around year earlier. From this information it would try to compose an image of what you were blogging about a year ago and match that with your current post. The match would be expressed as some kind of confidence level or correlation.

If you’re a real boring guy - 9 to 5 job, TV dinner, go to bed type of boring - with a fairly cyclical life you might end up with a high correlation between your posts. If that were really so, you’d only have to spend 2 years blogging to find out. Every time after that you could just assume that the previous year’s post are still valid and just re-post them, freeing up your time for the more important things in your sad life.

On the other hand if there’s rarely any match it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not boring. Perhaps the period is off, perhaps the cycle is not 12 but 6 or 7 or more months.

God I’m awefull when my mind gets dirty like that :-)

Imagine a gun capable of firing off a million rounds a minute. Now imagine this is not a dream but a reality. Such a barrage of firepower would please any backwater neo-conservative of the world. Soon they’ll all be lining up at the Pentagon asking big brother for their own garden variety of the toy.