Marty Kearns is sounding the alarm bells because he received a copy of the new “Beagle” virus with a return address at PoliticsOnline, the online newsletter about e-campaigning. Marty hypothesizes that perhaps hackers are attempting to target online Democratic GOTV organizing efforts.
Now I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that the most likely explanation for receiving a virus that appears to be from PoliticsOnline is that someone at PoliticsOnline got the virus via email (bad on them) and that Marty was in that person’s email address book, so the virus emailed itself out to him, faking the return address so that it was from another random user at PoliticsOnline.
If you check the Symantec info on Beagle, you’ll see that it notes that “the from address will be spoofed such that it will appear to come from someone belonging to the same domain as the receiver.”
Spoofed return addresses are very common with email viruses, and the address that a virus email appears to be from doesn’t tell you a thing about where the virus really came from, the intent of the virus sender, or anything else.
yeah, yeah ..I know how virus mimic email addresses. I do not think that is the primary reason why the this computer virus could be connected to the elections.
I guess that it is fair to assume that the a spammer would launch a virus to make a few grand from selling email addresses but not sane to assume that a virus could be used to knock out hundreds of thousands of dollars of organizing capacity? Why does the virus launch on the day of the Iowa caucus (maybe a quirk in timing)? Why does the virus stop itself on the 28th ( odd number of days assuming it was launched on the 17th) that also happens to be the day after the New Hampshire primary?
Why was politicsonline among the first sites affected (called symantec yesterday it was only “in the wild” between 0-2 sites )
I have never raised questions about viruses before and there are links to symantec on the original post. Sometimes, it is important to ask questions.
… and sometimes cooinicidence is just cooincidence.
I don’t see how this non-destructive virus is knocking out — has the potential to knock out — organizing capacity.
The people at PoliticsOnline are just careless with their virus protection, that’s the only conclusion I would feel comfortable drawing.
Ok
I will give up here and include a bit of damage to my reputation as part of the beagle strike.
I can wait until they grab that spammer (or maybe political hack).
hey..Did the fact that Mydoom launched on the day before the NH primary at least make you wonder?
Or that the really disruptive Denial of Service attacks start on February 1? The day before all the Democratic primaries?
This is three in a row.
I know. It is crazy but I can understand why those conspiracy crazies can get all hyped up.
coincidence is not causality.