There's still plenty of unprotected home users, but this virus isn't ground-breaking. |
This is not a spam reduction measure. It is a way for a legitimate merchant to avoid getting a false/positive in an AOL spam filter. |
Unless you're checking the log files on a mail server, you're not going to be aware this is happening. What you might be aware of is slow performance on your mail server. |
Until Thanksgiving, it was looking like a fairly ho-hum year in the area of e- mail viruses, and then the Sober variant broke out, and it set every record in the books for the sheer number of copies of it that we detected and blocked [and] its ability to propagate itself. It was unprecedented. |
We have seen it start to ratchet up, |
We thought we were going to have a boring year in viruses, and Sober really shook that up. |
We're going to see some virus activity there that takes advantage of that. I think we'll also start to see more companies recognizing that they need to put security solutions in place. |
What makes it a problem, regardless of why, is that smaller companies are the ones who have fewer defenses in place. There are no large dedicated IT staffs in place, or large budgets for technology, so it's a double whammy. |
When you have an email server like Microsoft Exchange, which is the most common for small businesses, you end up buying more hardware than you need in order to process the spam you've let in. |