They say the "attack on a MS website proved harmless" ?? Apparantly they werent inside of a network where the firewall got DDOSed. Some fark for brains smuggled this gem inside the network on their laptop and all hell broke loose. I hardly call that harmless. Having to go around patching halfwit's machines and kick them in the jewels. Albeit not my responsibility to track this junk down, it had to be done.

In other news, fark.com will be renamed to followup.com

Is that what it was?
We noticed a huge increase in executable attachments yesterday, and I threw together a filter to catch and throw it away.
I figured I'd watch the news today and find out what it was, but here it is on Fark already.

The virus will then send itself out to names found in the victim's address book and will use one of these names to forge a return address. As such, the infected party may not quickly learn of the infection, while an innocent party may get the blame for helping to propagate it.

ha this morning i got 2 emails from my school's listserve saying "your message 'Re: Details' has been sent to the moderator"

Just one more reason why e-mail ranks at the bottom of methods to get my attention. I check it maybe once a week, and (lo and behold) rarely find more than one or two useful emails in a sea of spam and virii.

i think there should be a virus that sends me SBB girls..

SBB girls may give you a virus.

Hint: When it says "Please see attached files", DON'T.

DAMN YOU MARY AND JIM!!!!1`

mattos = asshat!

...and Mac users continue to feel smug in their immunity to every famous virus, worm, or trojan horse anyone's ever heard of.

How long has this kind of thing been going on? How long now have we had viruses from opening attachments? At this stage of the game I have to think that everyone who gets infected with this thing deserves it. NewsFlash: Opening attachments in e-mails can get you into lots of trouble.

Don't. Open. Attachments.

This isn't rocket surgery, people.

...smuggosity ensues.

dammit jim, i need to make a 'smug' tag for this scheiss.

/now playing: james brown

The extension on the payload is frikken *.pif. Umm..do people read anything any more?

Damn irritating worm though. Hope people catch this quick and end it.

Immunity? Or is it just that so few people own Macs (proportionally) that it's not worth anyone's time to write them?

There's one extention that's scr. It's wicked_scr.scr.

Spamdog:
Why is mattos an asshat? because his email address was in someones addressbook that got this virus? Yeah, what a jerk!

...and Mac users continue to feel smug in their immunity to every famous virus, worm, or trojan horse anyone's ever heard of.

They're not immune. I guess virii makers don't feel the urge to make a virus for 5% of the market.

From a programming perspective, it's a lot easier to bust into a Windows box than a Unix box. Windows boxes tend to leave many more ports open stock than a Unix box. Unix boxen often resemble paranoid shut-ins. Most Macs nowadays run OS X, which means they run Unix, BSD Unix in fact, which not only resembles a paranoid shut-in, but one with a gun trained on the door.

/still smug

I bet that if the file were called "virus.exe" people would still open it.

One more reason why people really need to consider taking a class or two before buying a computer. I don't mean it to be derogatory or anything, but people go to Best Buy or whatever and spend hundreds of dollars on this big box with a TV attached to it and they don't read ahead about basic stuff regarding keeping it clean - like not opening attachments or regularly running Windowsupdate or using antivirus software. A lot of these problems could be avoided at the end-user level.

The rapid propogation of the SoBig virus is yet more evidence that the human population is rapidly swirling down the drain of stupidity.

No matter how many times moronic computer users are told - they just can't help clicking on those .scr attachments.

Ooooo... Wicked_scr.scr.... must click... must click....

Just what is "the worth" of writing these computer viruses, anyway? Use your powers for good not evil.

I'd love to see psychological profiles of virus authors. Is it ingenuity coupled with boredom or bitterness and mischief that drives these tards? Whatever, just another among many reasons I'm a happy Macfappy.

I swear, some day I'm going to write a horrendously evil mac virus, just to shut mac users up.

The article is rather incomplete; one of the things that set this virus apart from many others, was the fact this it didn't just retrieve e-mail addresses from MS Outlook / Outlook Express, but also from any .dbx, .eml, .hlp, .htm, .html, .mht, .wab and .txt file it can find on an infected system.

I can only be glad that we spotted the virus-emails in time, so that I could warn all our employees on all floors in time; I know it's stupid, but if you don't tell them repeatedly, they WILL eventually open up an unknown attachment, and I guess our company is not the only company in the world where the employees can be as clumsy as that.

Oh come on now, SquirrelWithLargeNuts, we Mac users have had viruses in the past. We had CDEF. That was what, 1987? 88?

/tip your waitresses, i'll be smug here all day

It's not that Mac users are immune to viruses, it's just that the viruses can't find any Macs to infect...

I think they should shut down the internet until we all learn to behave

hmmm i don't know, see whenever someone bothers to take the time to send me something with an attachment then i think it's rude not to open it up and you never know it could actually be genuine nude pictures of anna kournikova.

"I swear, some day I'm going to write a horrendously evil mac virus, just to shut mac users up."

Someone already beat you to it. It's called IE.

/on Safari

YankinDaneland: Oh yeah, totally. I thought the guy opened it. me = asshat. sorry mattos!

I know where a Mac is right now. It's out by my curb. I got it out of a dumpster It did'nt work so back to the trash it went. Good place for it.

SherKhan
"I'd love to see psychological profiles of virus authors. Is it ingenuity coupled with boredom or bitterness and mischief that drives these tards?"

I'd love to see the psychological profiles of the idiots who let the virus affect thier PCs. Perhaps they also leave their front doors open and keep their savings in a glass jar on the front lawn too.

blumf, personally i'm not so smugly superior in my computer skills that i believe that having little to no computer knowledge makes you a complete idiot and a mental case, do you work in IT support by any chance?

I had literally 40 copies of this in my inbox this morning - various subject lines, but all the messages said the same "click on the attachment for details...." And each is 100K and I use Yahoo for all my personal mail, so I was way over my size limit - such an annoyance.....

100k virus?

Someone already beat you to it. It's called IE.

*sigh* beaten by microsoft...atleast Wozniak and I have something in common.

I got it with the subject lines:

"My details;"
"Thanks a lot!;" and,
"Wicked Screensaver."

Mmm, Woz-zy goodness.

Truly, an engineering God.

If the Woz was still making Smackintoshes, your Mac OS would be 40k in size and do everything you ever wanted it to do.

It's a screen saver file.

I infected my puter once.
My sister had sent about 40 emails with pictures in quick succession.
I was rolling through them clicking the images and right in the middle of her emails was one with that fricking snowwhite and the seven dwarfs screensaver virus.
I forget what the virus was.

2003-08-20 07:49:35 AM SteelBoots
i think there should be a virus that sends me SBB girls..

I think you're more likely to get a virus from the SBB girls..

Ya know, I keep seeing everyone talking about how many copies of this thing have been blocked and how many e-mails they've recived.

Not had a single one appear, nor has Norton biatched that it's found it. I guess I'm just not loved :(

Same here, sarah_t_s . Isn't it sad when you can't find someone to infect you?