Imagine this. Someone's e-mail system receives a message that is infected with a virus such as SoBig or Klez. By its very nature, since the "From" header is usually forged to hide the true origin of the infected message, it most likely did not come from you, but you get a notification about it anyway. This happened to Chiqui:
It's one thing to send back a message saying "hey! you might be infected with a virus".
It's another to send a message saying "Hey! someone is infected with a virus, we KNOW it's not you, but we're sending you a message anyway for no good reason, because you won't be able to find the infected machine, either".
The real problem I see with e-mail virii and worms is the human factor. People send out notification messages of this sort and effectively multiply the damage caused by the virus/worm by wasting even more precious bandwidth across the Internet.
I have seen it on mailing lists before. Somebody gets an e-mail virus to which their anti-virus software alerts them. The message appears to have come from another member of the list or the list itself. Trying to be helpful, person sends a messages with a subject like "VIRUS ALERT" back to the list accusing someone else for sending them a virus and informing everybody to ensure their anti-virus software is up to date and to avoid opening any messages from so-and-so, blah, blah, blah...
This of course is followed by a rather heated thread regarding the issue of worms and virii which is probably ten to twenty messages long before the moderator steps in to declare it off topic. Of course, those ten or twenty messages got sent to a couple of hundred people. Now we're talking about perhaps 2000 messages bearing down on mail servers worldwide. All of this because one person recieved one message conaining a virus that his anti-virus caught for him anyway?
