InterScan NT Alert

[Daniel Berlin]

On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 virus_catcher at oceanic.com wrote:

> Receiver, AntiVirus Catcher has detected virus(es) in the e-mail
> attachment.  The Sender has been notified.
<RANT>
Good thing, too.
I was really worried it wouldn't notify *everyone it could find in a 8
million square mile area*.
Ya know, this crap reminds me of the old days where we had losing mailers
telling people about failures that they could do nothing about, and
wouldn't affect delivery of mail (Like telling me that some machine 5000
miles away suffered a power failure, and thus, was temporarily not
accepting mail, but I shouldn't worry, because it was queued up.)

It's like these pieces of software are so damn proud they actually caught
a virus for once, they feel they need to tell everyone they did it.
I'm surprised it didn't start picking out every site along the mail route,
and emailing everyone it could find at that site, telling them
too. Of course, they'll probably just marry it to spam mail
software, to get this type of effect.
Hey, look! Component reuse!

God forbid this piece of crap antivirus software be smart enough to just
log this, tell only the sender, and move on. Maybe if someone was really
paranoid, it could alert the  administrator.  Does it really need to alert
everyone (And what exactly is the receiver supposed to do, since they
don't have a virus anyway)?  I'm half expecting to be watching CNN, and
see "AntiVirus Catcher detected viruses, The World has been notified"
scroll across the bottom.

Apparently, the component to take care of notifying only the right
people hasn't been written yet.
But don't worry, they'll get to it right after they figure out how to
count the number of viruses it found in the message, and change the output
text.
</RANT>
--Dan