From: Adam L. Beberg (beberg@mithral.com)
Date: Thu May 04 2000 - 12:44:51 PDT
On Thu, 4 May 2000, Tom Whore wrote:
> A new VB worm is on the loose. This would normally not be bugtraq
> material as it exploits no new flaws but it has spread enough that it
> warrants some coverage. This is a quick and dirty analysis of what it does.
The mainstream press is all over this of course, reporting >75%
enterprise infection rates all over the planet. This one preaty much
dwarfs the infection rates and damage done by any other virus I can
remember.
So when are people gonna wake up and start blaming the real evil
hackers: Microsoft. Someone there, as well as the design team involved
decided that email wasn't good enough as text, and needed the ability to
read, write, and self-replicate.
Noone has suggested the solution to "uncheck the 'enable virus'
checkbox". Is there one? I use pine to read email, pine would have that
option if some programmer did turn into a raving luddite bent on
creating havok - and noone else noticed.
Wasn't Bill Joy just ranting in Wired mag about not giving
self-replication to the machines or "bad things" would happen?
Maybe we should send BillJ to see BillG with a large metal bat and let
him kick some ass.
[old bits: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html]
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?
if ( reader.OS == MS )
send this to all
delete hard drive
- Adam L. Beberg
Mithral Communications & Design, Inc.
The Cosm Project - http://cosm.mithral.com/
beberg@mithral.com - http://www.iit.edu/~beberg/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 04 2000 - 12:47:08 PDT