August 19, 2003 05:01am
Adult Industry Exceptionally Susceptible to Viruses?
Source: Adult Industry News
by: Steve Nelson
An unusual amount of email today? Don't expect your email with the subject of "Thank You!" to be answered anytime soon. The virus (actually it's technically a worm) dubbed "Sobig.F" spread quickly Tuesday morning affecting computers around the globe. How is the Adult Industry Exceptionally Susceptible? Read on...
I'm running Free BSD - a UNIX - so I'm not susceptible to viruses, worms and trojan horses like most users of Microsoft products. I usually have my spam filters in place filtering out most unwanted email to a special subdirectory I go through from time to time before deleting. Still, when I downloaded my email this morning I found I had received over 1500 emails in the preceding seven hours!
Evidently the Sobig.F is a worm that writes a trojan horse to your hard drive giving your system a back door that is exploited by turning your computer into a spammer without your knowledge! Is your system a little slow today? Is that little drive light ON a bit too MUCH?
My temporary fix has been adjust my spam filters to filter out the subjects of: "My details", "Your details", "That movie", "Your application", "Wicked screensaver", and "Thank You!" among some others. That takes care of most of it, but now I know for a fact I won't be reading emails from Robert Lombard of Creative Image Management who through gratitude usually has "Thank you" in his subject line. Also Daniel Metcalf, the publicist at Wicked Pictures, may have some of his press releases inadvertently filtered to trash.
My point? It's not that Sobig.F is directly targeting the Adult Industry. It's that spam and Adult Content are becoming synonymous. In the Adult Industry we need to get the email that most people filter to trash. Here a press release may come in with the words penis, Viagra, teen sex, or any number of other phrases that someone else would have automatically deleted! The spammers have to make a living too, right? Just like junk mail from the post office, spam wouldn't be here if it wasn't profitable to somebody!
Trouble is, if the Adult Industry doesn't find a way to be less of a pain in the ass to middle America, the noise these Americans make will be heard by our Democratic and Republican politicians who will unite against us for the "protection" of their constituencies and their own children and grandchildren.
The solutions we have now have worked in the past: I throw out junk mail from the US Postal Service cursing the waste of paper; I screen my calls at home and politely hang up at the office; I delete most spam one at a time... Trouble is, I won't have time to individually delete thousands of emails!
With the rise of adult-content spam will come a rise in the outcry from the average non-porn-watching American. The politicians will grab this and try and pass more laws regulating material that should be able to be viewed by adults who choose to view it. Spammers are digging the hole that will bury us all!
Anyone have a solution?
I'm done ranting,
Steve Nelson
Editor-In-Chief
Adult Industry News
AINews.com
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Note from the AINews Webmaster:
There's a little something that the techy press hasn't mentioned about this virus. In every one of the mails going out with SoBig.F there is a header that reads...
X-MailScanner: Found to be clean
Most E-Mail clients can be configured to filter on custom header information to get this out of your inbox. Refer to your E-Mail documentation or help files to see how to do this.
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