Been wormed, virused, blasted—now what?by CCIT StaffDuring the last few weeks, we were wormed, virused, and so blasted, our heads were spinning, and our hard drives weren’t. If something wasn’t crawling around in our computers, it looked like it was flying out of our e-mail, meaning to sting us and infect us and shut us down. The wormholes are plugged, for now, but only barely. We’ll hear from these buzzing nasties again. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also the harsh reality of this neophyte information age. Throughout the crisis, three questions were persistently asked: How did it happen? Whose fault is it? How do we keep it from happening again? Before answering “how” we’ll back up a bit. Worm and virus computer infections aren’t like catching a cold, where you grab a door handle right after it’s been touched by someone sick. It’s more like a disease where, if you engage in high-risk behaviors, you’re almost certain to have a close call. Worms like Blaster and Welchia exploit problems with operating systems, such as Windows, OS X, and Linux. The high risk behavior for worms is ignoring the need to apply patches that correct operating system problems. If you’re a Windows 2000 or XP user, you’ve seen the annoying little cloud pop up on the bottom right of your screen, the one that says, “Learn how to apply Windows updates.” Like almost 800 (and counting) coworkers, instead of learning how to apply the updates, you may have clicked on the X to make it go away. In this particular case, there had been warnings about bugs in the conventional media for several weeks. Microsoft itself issued a cautionary notice in mid-July, followed by a plea to apply update patches to Windows 2000 and XP computers (the worm wranglers decided not to pick on the old stuff like Windows 95 and 98). On Aug. 12, we and the rest of the computing community learned the consequences of not configuring our workstations. Viruses like Sobig.f also respond to a click but in a different way. Here, they come attached to e-mails from either people you don’t know or people you do know but who wouldn’t send you such a message. The high-risk activity for getting these infections is double-clicking on the attachment in order to see someone’s “beautiful girlfriend.” Because this method of infection is so well-known, MUSC’s e-mail systems are designed to render most of these messages useless. Still, MUSC’s filters won’t help when you use a different e-mail system, like AOL. And a handful of coworkers learned the consequences of double-clicking on unknown attachments. Feel bad now? That’s really not the point of this article. Instead of placing blame, by knowing the risk factors, you’re now armed to reduce the likelihood of being infected.
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