Mike Raiford wrote:

> I met the ILOVEYOU virus. It filled up my 
> entire inbox. Oh what fun that was. Of course, I knew the e-mails were 
> bogus when one of the first 10 was from the CEO. I downloaded the 
> script, and opened it in a text editor, just to see what it contained.

Anything interesting?

> The most interesting was the Worm that was infecting computers via file 
> shares. I had stored a few executables on the network share after 
> building them, then ran them (moments after the build completed, about 
> the time it took for me to go grab a drink from the fridge) They didn't 
> work ... Rebuild and execute again ... Didn't work ... Hmm... Build the 
> Debug versions (local to my machine) and they worked flawlessly. Hmmm. 
> Suddenly my boss shows up at my cubicle (He was also head of IT at the 
> time) says "Don't touch a thing" and yanks the network cord out of the 
> back of my machine. He then instructs me to open our virus software, 
> download the latest update and do a full system scan. My system had been 
> affected by the files I built moments before. All because someone 
> attached a dodgy laptop to the LAN and logged in, reconnecting 
> themselves to all of the file shares on the server, and infecting every 
> single writable executable on the file share. That virus was 
> particularly virulent. The writability hole was plugged on the shares I 
> used so that devs were the only ones with write privileges, but it would 
> appear from time to time (probably from the same individual, I dunno) 
> and totally cripple the network.

Wow. o_O

Sounds like almost as much fun as that time I accidentally configured 
our email server as an open relay. Needless to say, on Monday morning 
the server was nonfunctional. I forget what I was actually *trying* to 
do... but I missed out the step where you configure some setting or 
other that requires authentication or something, essentially yielding an 
open-relay configuration.

Oops. x_x

An a final thought... How many users would see a macro popup and decide 
to press "no"? It seems to me that lots of applications generate far too 
many popups (e.g., endless "are you sure?" messages where there is 
actually no danger), and users tend to just blindly click Yes to get rid 
of these irritations.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message