MODERATOR'S NOTE: apologies for 1 piece of spam

[Kelly Martin <kel () securityfocus com>]

Dear list subscribers,

I would like to apologize to all of you for approving a *single* piece
of spam to the Security-Basics mailing list yesterday. While I did not
receive any emails or complaints about it, the error came to my
attention today. As a stated policy, we do not distribute viruses or
spam through any one of our 31 mailing lists. The approval yesterday was
due to human error, due to a post that was not filtered by my extensive
spam filtering rules. While spam is merely an annoyance and is hardly
malicious, it is still unacceptable in my own mind to approve any kind
of spam to the list.

I will also take this opportunity to mention a bit about the track
record of the Security-Basics mailing list over the past couple of
years. Since June 2003, when I joined Symantec's SecurityFocus and
became moderator of this busy list, *not a single piece of spam* had
been distributed to the list until yesterday. This is despite the fact
that 95% of all the messages received in my moderator's queue are spam
and even malicious viruses. I would estimate that I've received tens of
thousands of spam emails into my moderator's queue in the last two years.

In short, the list is hit very hard every single day by dozens of
miscreants, spammers, script kiddies and automated virus infection
attempts. It is an enormous human effort to moderate all of these to
ensure that none of these make it through to our list subscribers -- and
during my tenture, not a single virus has ever been distributed through
the list. I think these facts speak for themselves.

Thanks for your time and attention -- and most of all, thanks to
everyone here who contributes their knowledge by posting to this list.
It's contributors like you that make this list such a valuable resource
for us all.

Best regards,

Kelly Martin
Moderator, Security-Basics