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I agree that the press is guilty of over doing things in reference to computer issues. The more hype, the more viewers, readers, and listeners I guess.
Personally, I look at the outbreaks of worms and viruses much like I look at an electrical storm------when a puter gets messed up somebodys gotta PAY somebody to fix em!!! That's where I come in....(:
WildTech
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I shoulda been born rich!!
[This message has been edited by WildTech (edited May 05, 2000).]
Hello all. I thought I would give you a little first hand experience with the Virus and how fast it can spread from a network admin point of view.
5 copies of the virus enters the company at 8:06 from one outside source.
Virus read at 8:18 - One person infects their computer. It starts pulling names out of Outlook starting with “All company” distribution list and moving down the list picking up all personal and global addresses. Spaming of the e-mail continued until 8:29 when I stopped our exchange server.
To make a very long story short, 30 desktops out of 500 were infected. From those 30 computers, in 11 min there were 11,000 e-mails sent out. In addition of over righting of JPEG’s, e-mails and contaminated computers we have cleaned over 50,000 copies of the virus as of tonight. By the time we are done I am guessing we well have killed close to 100,000 copies.
To add one more twist. Wednesday night, we updated all desktop and servers Norton anti virus with the most current definitions.
Yes we got bent over by this virus. We could have done a few things difrent but hind sight is 20\20!!
sj
[This message has been edited by sj (edited May 06, 2000).]
In response to GLSmith's query, a virus is so named because of the way it acts like a human virus. The two things a virus does is infect and replicate. By infect, I mean the virus actually inserts or adds its own code to a file that exists on the system. Replication is performed usually when the virus executes, loads itself into memory, and infects more files on the system. When these infected files are shared, the virus spreads to other systems.
Conversely, the worm spreads itself through replication but does not infect files on the system. A worm copies code into the startup routine of a computer so that it is loaded into memory when the computer starts, and then spreads itself through some sort of replication routine. In the case of this particular worm, it spreads itself by sending the visual basic script file through email to anyone in the local address book.
There is also such a thing as a Trojan Horse, or Trojan. A Trojan is neither a worm or a virus. A Trojan is, just as its name implies, a piece of destructive code hidden inside an executive program that appears useful. For example, the Doom II trojan that was circulating years ago was packaged as a WAD editor, and would in fact allow the user to edit wads and create Doom II levels, but when the program was exited the user would find that his/her first hard drive had been formatted. Trojans don't have replication engines, but people who receive them occasionally send them to others without realizing the harm they are doing.
Symantec estimates that there are 10-15 new viruses realeased into the wild daily. Of these, a small percentage are actually Trojans or worms, and a high percentage are macro viruses. Very few boot and exe/com viruses are written anymore.
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R. Bret Walker, CNE
All I can say is, Flyers win in 5th Overtime!!!
Could some1 pls send me this "Love Bug". I am learning Visual Basic, and like to see how it was written and what it does(myself) I have an old stand alone desktop, I will run it on that machine. I am not kidding either.
Thanks.
Thank you Mr. Walker,
Like I said I remember reading the difference once but I've never been good with remembering "official" terminology. I also haven't been around ( In the computer business that is) that long. The scary thing is I'm one of the few people around this area that seems to know what to do with viruses. Well at least one of the few that the general public can get access to. Thanks again!! With computers the learning never stops!!!
GLSmith
Hey folks,
I posted a request to send me the "Love Bug".
I got a copy from a friend. I realized it probably was not appropriate for me to post something like that on a public form. Sorry...
I should say not! Especially since as of May 9, there are 29 variants of this pesky little critter! It doesn't mutate itself, it takes an amateur VB programmer with too much time on her/his hands.
Symantec is releasing virus definitions almost daily now. All I can say is I hope my clients (the ones that aren't set up for automatic updates, and there are a few) are updating themselves! It sure is keeping me busy here, but so far, none has gotten in. I've got a log a mile long of attempted intrusions, but our Exchange agent is killing it before it gets to the clients (-:
Have I mentioned how much I like Norton? (-;
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R. Bret Walker, CNE
Flyers Win the Eastern Semifinals! New Jersey is next!