Topic: The German Spam .. Have YOU got yours?

So I am doing my usual spam cleanup when I realise that 80% of it is in German.

I begin to wonder, what is this all about?

Seems to be some form of complaint about the Dresden bombings and something about the Allied commanders commiting atrocities.

They are also spoofing email addresses, so if you receive one with @nzboards.com in the address field, it wasn't us.

We've been bombarded at work too.

Apparently there's nothing we can do about it at this stage. We're adjusting our spam filters but it's still coming through.

From the NZNOG operators list, you can blame all this on education:

Part of the problem here was the Ministry of Education supplies CA eTrust to most NZ state and state-integrated schools, and the other week CA took somewhere around 24 hours to get a definition for whatever Sober variant it was out. It was slipping straight through schools' desktop AV and (of the schools which have them) mail filters for a full school day. Teachers are
stupid* and open attachments, and with address books and schools on broadband, schools quickly infected other schools and so on...

It was one chaotic day. We're still getting many messages blocked which appear to be from other schools.

AW

On Mon, 16 May 2005 12:19, James Riden wrote:
| Lots of German-language spam yesterday and today, from various
| compromised machines around the world, including quite a few in New
| Zealand. Seems to be related to the Sober virus, as in the last
| similar incident.

* Honestly, if you want to really idiot-test software (or anything for that matter), put it into a school. Teachers can do many wacky things to break stuff.