OSEC

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Subject: Re: Subject line observation
From: Crispin Cowan (crispinWIREX.COM)
Date: Sun May 07 2000 - 20:10:56 CDT

"Robert G. Ferrell" wrote:

> Noticing the flurry of rejected messages I got back associated with the ILOVEYOU
> virus message post that I made 6 hours ago, it occurs to me that a very
> effective, if short-lived, DoS could be constructed by writing a similar virus
> and sending it out with very common words in the subject line, like "Security"
> or "Alert" or "Windows" or "Issues" or "Buffer" or a host of others. If, for
> example, people started filtering out all messages with the word "Security" in
> them because of a virus, that would bring several of the mailing lists I'm on
> almost to a halt. If the virus had a small database of those words and was
> self-modifying to choose one at random when it duplicated....

15 years ago, there was a rumor (now known to be true
) that the NSA was scanning the net for seditious traffic. Civil libertarians
responded by creating .sig files filled with seditious key words such as "bomb",
"terrorist", "communist", "frisbee" :-) and "pizza" :-)

Crispin
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Crispin Cowan, CTO, WireX Communications, Inc. http://wirex.com
Free Hardened Linux Distribution: http://immunix.org
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