From: Carey Lening (fork@xent.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Sat May 06 2000 - 01:13:59 PDT
On KPFK, one of the local stations in SoCAL, I heard an absoloutely
wonderful and clueful representation of this whole virus bit. The host (who
actually knew his technical bits) was interviewing the lead programing
director from Symantec. They managed to give a pretty indepth, not too
techy explanation of what the virus/worm did, how it infected various
machines, and how the folks go about making norton and fixing the
viruses. It was rather enlightening and bitful. They note that there were
5 main variants, and some useful user techniques to keep the thing from
propagating. The end featured a bit of psychology of the Virus writer,
which, being a psych major I had to admire. Point: The media is covering
this. If this had been on during prime driving hours instead of 11pm, that
would have been tops. But I applaud them for having it on at all.
-C
At 08:15 PM 5/5/00 -0500, Adam L. Beberg wrote:
>On Thu, 4 May 2000, Joachim Feise wrote:
>
> > > "Adam L. Beberg" wrote:
> > >
> > > > A bag of jellybeans says Microsoft gets zero blame for this, or even
> > > > associated with the $100M+ in estimated damages. Congress, the
> > > > pentagon, all hit. What happened to that cyberwarfare division the
> > > > president was hyping. Shouldn't they be protecting the pentagon from
> > > > enemies like Microsoft?
> >
> > Well, CNet starts to point to M$:
> > http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-1814907.html
> > Zboray harshly criticized Microsoft for releasing a programming
> > language with the "wrong security posture" to businesses and the
> > public. "Visual Basic script and the macros are proving to be a
> > disaster.
>
>Had to change the subject to even get through, every sendmail out there
>has it filtered. And you get some jellybeans, when you show up ;)
>
>Wow, this is getting interesting. Now it's up to $2.6Billion and known
>variant E (http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/love.htm) - meaning at least
>20+ variants out there untagged. Some of them are far sneakier and more
>destructive then love, even involving envy, pride, greed, and mothers
>day. Infection rates at this point are basicly every Microsoft reader
>with the virus add-on and a normal user at the keyboard.
>
>It's no longer filterable, so the only choice is to remove the virus
>add-on, or teach the users. If only clues were so viral. Still no sign
>of the media or others teaching people how to remove the real problem,
>so this will be going on for weeks if not months to come, as users
>cause headaches for geeks everywhere. Maybe someone can write a variant
>that emails everyone, then deleted the add-on :)
>
>- Adam L. Beberg
> Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
> The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
> beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
>
>
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