[Tutor] COOL! Surf's up! So's the wiki!

[Tim Peters]

[Kirk Bailey]
> OK, mail.python.org is back up.

It's still struggling to return to normalcy, but the worst may be over.

> Great news, sorry the virus hit the thing to begin with- is it a
> windows server, perish the thought?

No, no.  There was no virus *on* mail.python.org.  The virus had no direct
effect on the box (which is a Linux box regardless).  What happens is that
worms sending email forge the sender address, and because python.org hosts
many well-known email addresses, countless virus messages went out claiming
to come from python.org; this was on top of that the virus found a
python.org email address on many machines that were infected, so tried to
send itself to one or more python.org addresses from infected machines.

The result was hundreds of thousands of connections trying to send email to
a python.org address, either the virus trying to propagate itself, or idiot
email servers replying to a forged python.org sender address to complain
about a virus they received.  Add to that the occasional clueless virus
recipient sending outraged email back to a forged python.org address, and in
some cases thousands of outraged emails.

The moral of the story is that you don't have to contract a virus to suffer
from it:  the huge email traffic it generates can kill you regardless, if
you're unlucky enough to be picked as a recipient or as a forged sender
address.  The operating system you run is irrelevant then.