Another aspect of the ILY incident that has not really been adequately addressed concerns all the management-level sheep out there who flocked to insecure MS systems over the past few years, hired expensive MCSE's to run the damn things and then got hit by Melissa over ONE YEAR AGO. Followed by Freelinks VBS virus. And what happens last week? History repeats itself, another virus hits, and the effect is even more devastating than the previous round. Beside Microsoft being culpable for leaving its systems open to these attacks, I'm afraid the blame stick has to be struck on the skulls of all those sys admins out there in MS land who have done literally nothing over the past year and a bit to prevent Melissa repeats. Some might even call it gross incompetence. Don't blame the perpetrators of ILY - they are giving us a long overdue reality check. Blame the creators and maintainers of systems that allow these intrusions to happen. BTW: the installation that keeps my bread buttered installed a multi-tiered predominantly open source viral scanning gauntlet through which all incoming emails are passed before being spooled for internal redistribution. This is a company of some 400 employees. Narry a single ILY got through, even though *no changes* were made to the configuration of the email gauntlet prior or post the outbreak. How? Simple: this clever stack of software banishes and bounces any emails containing the following attachements: .EXE .DLL .BAT .VBS .COM .etc .etc .etc as well as any email that contains any of the known 49000+ viruses (99.9999% of which affect only Windows), regardless of how they are sent, be it as attachments or buried inside any level of tar and zip files. This impressive feat was accomplished in one afternoon's work by a talented sys admin here. I know of at least one ISP that offer the same type service to their customers. The feat could certainly be repeated ad infinitum around the zillions of email installations around the globe. It ain't secret, it ain't rocket science and it ain't Microsoft. But it works wonders. Rgds Rick W -- Rick Welykochy || Praxis Services -- SLUG - Sydney Linux Users Group Mailing List - http://www.slug.org.au To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe in the text
