21 January 2005

Midlands email issues

On Tuesday 18 January, all member companies in the Midland region received multiple copies of the same email. Whilst all duplicates appeared to be from a BPIF member of staff, this was actually the result of some of our members’ email servers being incorrectly installed or maintained. The problem is not a result of a virus or worm but in fact a Microsoft vulnerability. BPIF’s email server was functioning satisfactorily and the software had been maintained and was up to date. BPIF has been an innocent victim in this incident. However, this has caused much inconvenience for the recipients, for which BPIF sincerely apologises. We believe that the cause of the proliferation has been the use of Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 (SBS 2003) in use by certain recipients (members) of our email. In certain circumstances, this software can accidentally re-send certain messages, and this is exacerbated where two or more of such users are in the same batch of email. So far we have established that at least 4 of our members were found to be running unpatched versions of SBS 2003 as their primary email software. For the avoidance of doubt, BPIF does not operate SBS 2003, we use a Linx based system that does not have this problem. This is a known software fault and is reported as a recommended upgrade/patch on Microsoft’s website. We have subsequently become aware of previous similar occurrences (unrelated to the BPIF) also linked to SBS 2003; in these instances propagation has continued for several days following the suspense of outgoing emails from the original source. BPIF is recommending to SBS 2003 users that they download and apply the appropriate patch. We are contacting the member companies that are sending the emails and helping them to resolve the problem. The volume of propagation and calls received from members by the BPIF has significantly reduced, we believe as a result of this action, coupled with advice provided to those companies we have identified as users of SBS 2003. Note: Microsoft strongly recommend to its users that they should regularly visit their download centre at: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/search.aspx?displaylang=en to access all available software updates. Specific updates for Windows Small Business Server are available from: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/downloads/default.mspx