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Urgent: Infinite Loop at Pelephone!



Hi,

I know that there are some system administrators of ISPs and other
big organizations, universities, etc., in this list, so this issue
is not off-topic:

Since about 21:00 o'clock, Pelephone added an acknowledge message
to the service of PeleText. The sender receives an automatic ack,
saying: "Message Delivered", and the message.

Hundreds of Israelis installed an automatic forward, from their e-
mail address (like in my case - marmor@elmar.co.il), to their Pele-
Text address, so any incoming message (in my case - only important
messages, excluding many filtered-out-messages/spams/messages-from-
mailing-lists/etc.), causes the phone to beep, and the text of the
message to be displayed.

Unfortunately, since this evening, the sender of the forwarded
message (in my case - marmor@elmar.co.il), receives immediately an
ack. This ack is forwarded too (unless the filter is fixed) to the
phone, and causes another message to be sent to the "victim".

So, urgently, all the forwards to anything@msg.pelephone.co.il must
be removed, or such messages filtered out (for example - by
procmail rules).

I contacted Pelephone and tried to explain the bug. I hope they
understood, so the bug will be fixed. Otherwise, some people will
receive thousands of messages (EACH ONE!) this night, some mail-
servers will crash, and maybe some disks will be out of space. Or
PeleText will crash before :-)

According to my estimates, the damage of this "virus", may exceede
the damage that "Melissa" caused. Contrary to Melissa, when a
special code was defined by the virus in the registry, to prevent
repeated messages from the same infected computer, here the loop is
completely infinite.

-- 
Eli Marmor
marmor@elmar.co.il
El-Mar Software Ltd.
050-237338