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"Sobig.F Virus Update - Freeola"

In an effort to prevent Freeola users from further being affected by the Sobig.F vurus, our mail servers are blocking is any any .pif attachment. This is the methid the Sobig.f is using to propogate.

Due to the nature of this virus, it is actually killing the POP accounts of people who are running up to date virus guards as well as those who arn't.

Thier POP accounts are getting filled up with thousands of e-mails containing the virus and also bounce back warning from e-mails sent from other PC's spoofing the mail as being sent from them. There is just to much mail for them to download.

To prevent this from further affecting Freeola users, We are now blocking and returning all mail being sent to the Freeola servers with these .pif attachments.

This should not affect many/if any users as who actually sends .pif files? If you do need to receive a .pif file, just get the sender ot Zip it up first and then send it.

I am still getting these viri btw.

Primal wrote:
> A simple alternative would be to advice users to stop using Outlook
> Express and use Mozilla mail. Viruses aren't usually programmed to
> work in a non-Microsoft environment (as far as I'm aware).
>
> No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong! ;-)

It's Windows that runs the file, not OLE. Therefore any client running under Windows and capable of dealing with attachments is potentially at risk.

A program like Mailwasher will solve that problem, since it only downloads the first few ilines of text and ignores images and any other files. Although its Windows only, I'm sure there's a viable alternative on other platforms.

True but the annoyance with SoBig is that you can get 10, 20, 30 100kb E-mails in your inbox that presents quite a problem to dialup users.

A simple alternative would be to advice users to stop using Outlook Express and use Mozilla mail. Viruses aren't usually programmed to work in a non-Microsoft environment (as far as I'm aware).

No doubt someone will correct me if I'm wrong! ;-)

Icarus wrote:
> Erm, this may be silly, but who uses .pif files?

For one sobig.

http://www.filext.com/ detaillist.php?extdetail=pif&Submit2=Go%21

space.

Erm, this may be silly, but who uses .pif files?

freeola-moderator wrote:
> To prevent this from further affecting Freeola users, We are now
> blocking and returning all mail being sent to the Freeola servers
> with these .pif attachments.

I deny that. I've just got one for a start. When are you going to be implementing this?

You may want to mail all your users informing them of this.