Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Jeremy Portzer <jeremyp AT pobox.com>]

On Mon, 2004-07-26 at 13:42, matusiak wrote:
> Anyone else getting 1,400 of these an hour?  It all seemed to begin 
> around noon today.  Basically, false "delivery failure" reports, most 
> indicating that my infected computer is running a hidden proxy server 
> for spammers.  They all seem to have Windows viruses attached, which is 
> wasting a lot of bandwidth.  And, no, the message below did *not* come 
> from "The matusiak.org support team."

Reports are this virus is related to why Google is (partially) down. 
(It works for me, but not for my co-workers.  I use a different proxy
server; apparently google services different IP addresses in different
ways.)  At any rate, the virus is trying to do automated queries from
Google, which has either overwhelmed them or caused other related
failures.  This according to speculation on
http://www.webmasterworld.com/ .

Google is implementing some sort of blocking to prevent the automated
queries; try a search on "email slashdot.org" for example and you'll
probably get an error (assuming your Google searches are working at
all).

Yes, the Internet can be more fragile than people would think!    When's
that secure e-mail coming folks?

--Jeremy

P.S. Dave, glad to see that the "matusiak.org" team is looking out for
you.  :-)

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| Jeremy Portzer        jeremyp AT pobox.com      trilug.org/~jeremy     |
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