Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!rutgers!apple!claris!ames!decwrl!vixie
From: vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Vixie)
Newsgroups: ca.news,comp.misc
Subject: Re: AP Press Release: UUCP Virus (no it wasn't a UUCP virus)
Summary: it was an SMTP/TCP worm
Message-ID: <18@jove.dec.com>
Date: 5 Nov 88 11:12:55 GMT
References: <5355@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU>
Followup-To: news.sysadmin
Organization: DEC Western Research Lab
Lines: 30

I see that this was cross-posted to comp.misc, and perhaps someone else has
already answered it there.  But in any case, I have a few points to make, in
order of importance:

1. UUCP sites are in no known danger. When I heard that people had yanked their
  Telebits out of the wall after hearing about this, I remembered that most
  general-purpose damage done in plague situations is from the panic and mis-
  information.

2. USENET is a lousy way to get real live newswire-type information broadcast;
  in particular, this topic has been discussed at length in news.admin and
  news.announce.important as well as comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes.  Forwarding a
  piece of AP News is almost always silly, since news takes a few days to
  get everywhere -- when Challenger blew up, 20 people logged in and typed
  a short message about it.  I read about it in the next day's paper before
  I saw any of the USENET messages on the topic.

3. If anyone wants to discuss this, please do it in news.sysadmin.  Neither the
  worm (note: it's _not_ a virus) nor anything else I've said here has any
  business in ca.unix or comp.misc.  I've redirected followups, please respect
  that.

4. Do you really have anything to add?  If you have a one-line comment that
  you think is pretty cute, please try it out on your cat -- bandwidth spent
  on the worm in weeks to come is going to be horrendous, please don't add
  to it without a Compelling Reason.
-- 
Paul Vixie
Work:    vixie@decwrl.dec.com    decwrl!vixie    +1 415 853 6600
Play:    paul@vixie.sf.ca.us     vixie!paul      +1 415 864 7013