The CFAES mail server appears to be under a spam attack. Service will be intermittent all morning. Hopefully, the problem will be solved by noon today.

April 1st is the reported date the Conficker worm calls home to receive instructions from its botnet masters. There’s a lot of hype surrounding this “April Fools” worm.  Actually, Conficker.C is a new variant of a worm that’s been around since late last year.  It exploits the MS08-067 vulnerability in un-patched Windows systems.  Microsoft issued a patch for the vulnerability last October.

Much of the hype is just that, hype.  Though worms and botnets are serious business, claims that Conficker will wipe out your computer or bring down the Internet are improbable.   That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be concerned, but as long as your Windows patches and anti-virus definitions are up-to-date, you should be OK.  Actually, hype can be a good thing.  It give us a “teachable moment,” an opportunity to start a conversation about Internet security.

If concerned about an infection, McAfee AVERT is offering a special version of its famous Stinger virus removal tool.  The Conficker Stinger is not a substitute for a full anti-virus application, but can help in the removal of the worm.  Click here to download the current version.

The CFAES mail services were restored at approximately 4:30 a.m. on Sunday 9/14/08. Currently all of the mail by the SPAM firewall is still being downloaded to the mail server. The SPAM firewall buffered all mail from Friday until Saturday at 5:00 p.m. Most mail that was buffered will show a received time of Sunday morning. Any mail sent to our servers after the SPAM firewall was full (Saturday 5:00 p.m. to Sunday 4:00 a.m.) should be resent from the senders mail server within the next 24-48 hours.

Over Labor Day weekend, the CFAES mail server was upgraded to a newer version.  This will cause some Outlook users to receive a new error message:

Outlook will still work, just click OK to continue.  The new MAPI connector can be downloaded from this link: http://www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~utils/mapi.zip.  Save the file mapi.zip to your desktop, or someplace where you can find it.  Make sure Outlook is not running, then open the mapi.zip file by double clicking it.  Now double click the setup.exe file to update Outlook.  The install application will ask if it should update or install, you need to select update.  It will then ask if you “want to configure your mail profile now?”  Select no.  You can now restart Outlook.

Well it seems that SP3 is here for XP, for some time now SP3 was available as a download in beta form. From a blog I just read from PCWorld. It seems that there was a conflict with some program called Microsoft Dynamics RMS. Microsoft has placed a filter of some sort on the Windows Update page that will not allow SP3 to be downloaded to computers with the Dynamics RMS software on it. You can also download the service pack 3 manually from the Microsoft Download Site.