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From: Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org>
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Subject: Re: Forged whitelist spam
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Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 12:28:02 +0200 (CEST)

On 10 Aug 2002, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:

> My uneducated guess is that all they need to jump expensive whitelist
> walls would be buckshot a spam-laden Klez with a 5-million-addresses
> mailer; if it finds just one vulnerable host on an Exchange server,
> through hopping addressbooks across a few degrees of freedom, a world
> of whitelists are instantly breechable.

You seem to be saying that whitelists are useless, because there are worms
which can compromise your system, read your address book/whitelist, and
sent themselves on, compromising a nonnegligible fraction of systems as
they go along. 

While mailing lists can be spam/worm amplifiers, I don't think this is
true for individual users even today. Moreover, worms which use email as
vector exist *only* because a single vendor ships mailers with broken
default settings, and insists to make documents executables. This makes
for very bad press, and eventually that vendor is going to wise up, and 
stop shipping as many broken wares (or people will switch to more secure 
alternatives, whatever comes first).



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