SoBig Pain in the Butt. While most of the media's focus remains on the Blaster virus, a variant of which was created by a high school miscreant, the SoBig virus rolls on in relative obscurity. Perhaps it doesn't have as cute a name as Blaster, but for sheer pain-in-the-neck productivity loss, the SoBig virus reigns supreme.
I'm still getting more than a thousand surplus emails per day, between the virus emails themselves, mail servers sending me notices that I have sent them a virus due to spoofed headers, and notifications from mailing lists that think I'm trying to subscribe. In fact, I got 18 new SoBig emails during the writing of this post alone. When in the office, it's easy enough to filter out the emails, but web-based email is all but unusable.
Hundreds of thousands of random email addresses are showing up in my inbox and yours.
The real kicker? Experts believe this virus has a purpose, harvesting active email addresses to be sold to spammers. So not only do we get this wave of virus-mail, we can all prepare for the coming tsunami of spam.
And there's not a thing we can do about it. [Fast Company Now]