WMF

I’m trying to come up with a creative use for the acronym WMF, but they all wind up something that wouldn’t be exactly G-rated. It’s that MF at the end, it’s too easy…

Anyway, we were full on trying to get things secured against the WMF exploit in the office today. Our network folks threw together an addition to the login script that unregisters the DLL, as I’m sure you’re all familiar with. We did some quick testing and got everything ready so that as folks login tomorrow, it’ll go into affect. Our network admin took the additional step of sending out an email to everyone explaining why we were doing this and about how it will break thumbnails, etc. and how to make sure pictures open in IE or Paint when Windows Picture and Fax viewer is disabled. I thought that was a nice touch, all the way until he ended the email with “If you experience anything else out of the ordinary, contact the help desk”.

I understand why we need to do that, and I certainly would want our users to let us know if there are problems with the script that we missed in our quick testing today, but I also know that was an open invitation to blame all sorts of unrelated problems on us, because we’re the ones who installed this fix. I guess that’s just the price we have to pay for trying to keep everyone in the loop and motivated to give us feedback, but I already know at some point tomorrow we’re going to get the you guys did “X” to my computer and now I can’t get to Google types of calls. You know what I mean?

Tags: WMF

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5 Comments

  1. It’s good customer service, which is the industry you are in. 🙂

    Tons of people know technical skills, but very few bring a customer service ethic to the process.

    Kudos to your network admin for finishing his email with that offer.

  2. Patrick, you’re absolutely right, it’s all about the customer service, and it’s all about making sure things are working correctly for our users. That’s why we’re there!

  3. This won’t protect you. Check out GRC.com for a temporary patch until MS get’s off their duff and fixes it for real.

  4. It won’t *fully* protect the machines but in a corporate lan its the best way to fix it until tuesday/wednesday.
    The patch that grc talks about was not available from the original page yesterday and has to be installed by hand – not useful in a lan.
    Naturally if you’d read my blog you could have just pinched my script for the login process 🙂

  5. Andy, I saw that on your blog, but I leave the scripting to others around here. In a way, it’s kind of nice to have other people who can whip out a script in a matter of minutes working with you. 🙂

    And, E yeah I know, and we all know it won’t 100% protect us, but it’ll do enough to keep the network safe until next week, when we have an official MS patch, which is all we’re really looking to do.

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