[vox] [OT] Slammer knocked out nuclear plant safety monitoring system

[R. Douglas Barbieri]

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On Wed, Aug 20, 2003 at 04:34:15PM -0700, Bill Kendrick wrote:
>=20
> Yeah, it's interesting...  Every time a huge virus comes out, I overhear
> the warnings "Don't open any files unless they come from someone you know=
!"

I have personal experience with this. I have a Windows box at home which
my wife uses.  She opened an email which bore a From header apparently
from her mother. The subject said "Our schedule" and it contained one
attachment: schedule.exe. So she unwittinly opened it because she
thought she was trusted.

The computer wound up contracting a virus; I can't remember the
name, but I can tell you the effects. It opened her address book and
delivered itself to everyone contained within. It ground my email
server to a halt, and when I looked in the logs, I determined the reason
was that it was trying to send to a whole slew of email addresses which
were no longer valid.

The virus executable was impossible to remove, in fact--deleting from
the explorer shell had no effect--neither did trying the "DEL" command
from the command prompt.  I had to completely wipe the OS and reinstall
from scratch. I couldn't trust any EXE or DLL on the system at all for
fear of them being infected as well.

I'd love to get rid of Windows entirely from my home, and will, the day
Adobe Premiere finally works correctly under Linux/Wine. What a
bollocked platform...

>=20
> -bill!
>=20
> --=20
> bill@newbreedsoftware.com                    Was I useful?  Rate this mes=
sage!
> http://newbreedsoftware.com/bill  http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?r=3Dbillk=
endrick
> _______________________________________________
> vox mailing list
> vox@lists.lugod.org
> http://lists.lugod.org/mailman/listinfo/vox

--=20
R. Douglas Barbieri
doug@dooglio.net
http://www.dooglio.net

vi: "The way God meant for man to edit text files..."

GPG Fingerprint: FE6A 6A57 2B95 7594 E534  BFEE 45F1 9E5E F30A 8A27
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