Messages received at the MMD publication email account,
<rolls@foxtail.com>, have increased to 20 or 30 times the daily norm.
Almost all the increase appears to be due to the mass e-mail worm,
"W32.Sobig.F@mmF", that appeared early Monday, 19 August.  Ref.:
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/

I inspected 480 junk messages (and senseless replies to junk messages)
that arrived within a 2-hour span today.  The headers indicated that
one-third of the worm messages entered the Internet at 62.162.83.138;
I could find no information about this rogue IP address.

Among the 480 worm messages were several bearing the forged identity
of familiar MMDers, including Marty Roenigk, Dan Wilson (London) and
<whoops!> Robbie Rhodes!

Jody is closely watching the Foxtail computer; he says there is no
evidence that foxtail.com is the origin of any worm messages.  He also
said (rather glumly) that some are passing through the "industrial
strength spam filter" he established on email coming in to his private
email account.

An article on the Reuters news service said experts remarked that there
has not been so much virus activity since the Code Red and Nimda worms
hit about a year ago.  See
http://money.cnn.com/2003/08/20/technology/worms.reut/index.htm

"Sobig.F" and other recent worms are carried by malicious programs
attached to ordinary email messages.  If you don't open (execute) the
attached program the worm won't infect your computer; simply delete the
email message and the attachment.

Learn how to check the message headers, too (read the instructions for
your email program).  If you get a suspicious message purporting to be
from a regular correspondent, you can compare its header with the header
of an earlier message to check for validity.

Robbie Rhodes
Etiwanda, Calif.