Yesterday I finished off a memo to my boss about what I think we need to upgrade before the end of the year and where we stood on some other things. She signed off on the upgrades which means now we get to take the suggestions to the President and the other senior staff people. This is where the fun starts. Rather, this is where the whining starts. This is where the people who can barely turn on their own PC's suddenly decide they know more about what we need than I do, or they decide that since that department is getting a new machine they certainly need one for their department, or they just want to take the opportunity to complain about our database or Office or something else without having any real idea of what they would replace it with. My initial guess is that getting approval for these upgrades is going to take at least a month, and 4 meetings with various people to discuss them. Maybe we should start a pool? *L*
For the record the upgrades I think we need:
Moving to Symantec's Corporate Edition AV product. Replacing the 2 PC's that we didn't replace in 2000 with new Dell's, albeit scaled down versions as these are not heavy users. Replacing the 3 laptops that are now 3 years old and are showing signs of wear with 2 new laptops and a desktop. (One of the jobs in questions has changed over the last 3 years and involves much less time out of the office.)
That's it. There's some bigger issues in the memo but all of them are clearly marked "For future discussion" because there just isn't enough information available about where we're headed to give a good guess as to what we might need 2 years from now. This should be pretty simple, but I know it won't be. It never is... Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark|
9:27 AM |
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Thursday, August 21, 2003
Last bit on SoBig
Lots of folks are pitching a fit with MS over this bad boy, and certainly MS deserves some blame for the faults in their software. On the other hand, Outlook is getting better at recognizing dangerous attachments (at least the beta of 2003 seems to me to be better at it), it's starting to not run HTML by default, and MS generally seems to want to get these improvements out there in the general public and make them safer.
Also, you've got to lay a bunch of the blame on the people who write these things, whose sole purpose seems to be to disrupt normal internet life for everyone. They're easily the "baddest" guys in this story.
Lastly, and perhaps most surprisingly, you have to blame end users. This is not Blaster, which got in because you hadn't gotten around to patching a machine. That's a shame that users didn't get their machines patched, but understandable to a degree. SoBig requires end users to open attachments or download infected files from file sharing networks to spread. How long have IT people been lecturing end users about the dangers of these activities? How long have people been told not to open attachments unless they know 100% what it is and who sent it. How many times do people have to be told how to handle downloads and attachments before they get it? Or do they just not care? Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark|
9:29 AM |
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003
Autoresponders And Challenge Response Make Virus Worse
"One thing that's different, this time, though, is that along with all the usual bounces, I'm getting an annoying amount of "challenge-response" requests from people I didn't email. In other words, the virus emails someone randomly and puts my email address as the "reply-to". If the recipient is using challenge-response, then the challenge gets sent out to me, adding to my own pain (and, initially, confusion). Yet another example of how challenge-response is a "solution" that makes things worse, not better. "
I'm not seeing a whole lot of challenge-response but I am seeing some, along with a whole lot of autoresponders from email gateways telling me that I have a virus. You'd think the people who built these email gateway anti-virus tools would have known better than to even bother sending these, wouldn't you? Or you'd think that the admins of these systems would disable the autoresponders when they know very well that the from address is being spoofed! Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark|
3:30 PM |
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Busy morning
Just a little busy, have already fielded a number of questions about the SoBig worm and a number of emails that are still hitting our accounts, repaired a Windows NT installation in order to get a laptop booted again, and ran all of our billing for this month, all by 9:10AM. ;)
Angela seems to have gotten hit pretty hard by this SoBig worm. Her personal account has gotten, what is it close to 100 by now, honey? I've checked the headers and they all originate from the same IP address! It's a columbus.rr.com address, if the person doesn't get this under control soon we may have no choice but to drop a line to abuse@rr.com and ask them to contact the person in question. Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark|
9:15 AM |
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003
Email worm on the loose?
Anyone else seeing just a ton of emails with attachments named either wicked_scr.scr, thank_you.pif, details.pif, application.pif or others today? I've seen these hit our work email accounts, my personal accounts, my wife's work email, and others just in the last few hours. Our ISP seems to be stripping the attachments on our work accounts, and I'm not dumb enough to open them on my personal accounts, but I haven't seen any news items on these. I also assume,. since I've seen some of them bounce back to those emails, that the worm is forging the "from" field as well.
So which one would aggravate you more. The fact that the summer intern showed up one day without you knowing anything about it or having anything prepared, or the fact that she finished her internship Friday and no one bothered to tell you so you could disable her accounts and pick up the laptop she was using and get it stored properly until Tuesday morning?
"And indeed, this person went ballistic. Had he read the confirmation note, he would have seen what was going on, and that he was NOT yet signed up for anything at all. If he had simply ignored or deleted the confirmation request (as the instructions in the note explain), that would have been the end of the story. But no, that would have been too simple.
Instead, this bonehead triggered an automatic mail-attack program that sent me 25,000 "no, I do not want your offering" messages in the course of a few ugly hours"
Yet another reason that email newsletters may be moving to RSS more and more, no?
Don't you just hate Mondays that drag on forever? Those days when you don't really have anything to do so the day just drags and drags. How about days where you do have a bunch of work to do and yet, inexplicably, the day drags anyway! I just looked up from a bunch of reports and written assessments thinking I should be getting ready to leave only to find that it's not even 4 yet!
I saw on the news where they think the big blackout started somewhere near Cleveland. Now, as any good Ohio resident can tell you, Cleveland fully deserved it's nickname (the mistake on the lake) long before this event occurred, but it somehow does seem fitting, doesn't it?
BTW, some of the reasons Cleveland is known as the mistake on the lake? Well there was the time the river caught fire, not to mention the fact that the city was, supposedly, named after someone named Cleaveland, so it's even spelled incorrectly! We won't even get into the rich, mistake prone, sports history of the town either.... ;) Digg this | Post to del.icio.us| FaceBook | Stumble Upon| Google Bookmark|
10:28 AM |
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