MODERATOR'S NOTE: apologies for 1 piece of spam

From: Kelly Martin (kel_at_securityfocus.com)
Date: 03/08/05

  • Next message: Mitchell Rowton: "Re: Career Choice"
    Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 12:33:37 -0700
    To: security-basics@securityfocus.com
    
    

    Dear list subscribers,

    I would like to apologize to all of you for approving a *single* piece
    of spam to the Security-Basics mailing list yesterday. While I did not
    receive any emails or complaints about it, the error came to my
    attention today. As a stated policy, we do not distribute viruses or
    spam through any one of our 31 mailing lists. The approval yesterday was
    due to human error, due to a post that was not filtered by my extensive
    spam filtering rules. While spam is merely an annoyance and is hardly
    malicious, it is still unacceptable in my own mind to approve any kind
    of spam to the list.

    I will also take this opportunity to mention a bit about the track
    record of the Security-Basics mailing list over the past couple of
    years. Since June 2003, when I joined Symantec's SecurityFocus and
    became moderator of this busy list, *not a single piece of spam* had
    been distributed to the list until yesterday. This is despite the fact
    that 95% of all the messages received in my moderator's queue are spam
    and even malicious viruses. I would estimate that I've received tens of
    thousands of spam emails into my moderator's queue in the last two years.

    In short, the list is hit very hard every single day by dozens of
    miscreants, spammers, script kiddies and automated virus infection
    attempts. It is an enormous human effort to moderate all of these to
    ensure that none of these make it through to our list subscribers -- and
    during my tenture, not a single virus has ever been distributed through
    the list. I think these facts speak for themselves.

    Thanks for your time and attention -- and most of all, thanks to
    everyone here who contributes their knowledge by posting to this list.
    It's contributors like you that make this list such a valuable resource
    for us all.

    Best regards,

    Kelly Martin
    Moderator, Security-Basics


  • Next message: Mitchell Rowton: "Re: Career Choice"

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