Publication Date: January 30, 2004
Author: General Manager| Students Channel| FSA ASEDS
Summary: FSATech Listserv Received an email which Contained a virus
Posted on 01-30-2004
TO: All Destination Points
FROM: U.S. Department of Education
RE: FSATech Listserv Received an email which Contained a virus
Last week, FSATech listserv received an email which contained a virus.
The listserv was temporarily brought offline to prevent the virus from
causing damage and being passed on to subscribers. When the listserv
was later brought back online, the listserv configuration was
unintentionally modified, allowing non-subscribers, such as spam
vendors, to post messages to the list. As a result, one of those spam
vendors managed to post an advertisement of a sexual nature to the list.
Our filters managed to prevent the message from being posted to
individual subscribers, but did not prevent it from being included in
the Digest (wherein several postings are included in a single email to
Digest subscribers). This inadvertent posting was discovered quickly.
An apology was issued to the subscriber who brought this to our
attention and we are truly sorry if any of our subscribers were
offended.
We have since taken steps to insure such an incident does not occur
again. We have configured our server differently and are confident we
will be able to overcome any future attacks of that nature.
Again, we apologize for this incident. If you have further concerns,
please do not hesitate to contact us. Thank you.