Flipping heck, I wrote this entry once but it didn’t get posted. Anyhoo:
We got hit by three worms today, just in our office. This on top of spending the last week clearing the Klez worm AND Kuang, which had infected almost every .exe and .com file, knackering the machine. I ended up having to save his files, format and install XP.
Today we got hit by Nachi, which is no biggie, as it’s apparent intention is to plug the MS Blast worm security hole and fix your machine if it had it. If you remember, this was in the press for launching a denial of service attack from an infected machine against windowsupdate.com. One of the girls in the office picked that worm up on her home machine last week, and I know that’s got Zonealarm (firewall) running on it because I installed it. her other half does have to disable it every now and then though to get VPN to work. They’ve upgraded to the Pro version now – that keeps the firewall up and lets VPN work.
On my machine I got a warning about the Sobig.f worm trying to kick off from my anti virus software. On 2 other machines people didn’t do so well and the worm executed and started attacking other mahines on the network. And the Cardiff University network is big. I had to pull those of the net. They’ll get patched when they boot up tomorrow morning.
The Sobig worm is a little sod. It starts up it’s own little SMTP server and starts banging out emails to all and sundry, spoofing their source. This floods the network with what appears to be spam. A major pain in the arse. The Cardiff IT people seem to be getting a stranglehold on it. I guess most people on the network were affected, and others throughout the world too.
I can’t even remember what the third worm was. It may well have been the Lovsan worm itself.
What the hell is going on at the moment? I’ve never had so much hassle. I remember the days when all my anti-virus software found was the odd Word macro virus that never did a bloody thing. I had to waste a load of time fixing software at home when a virus got in on a disk from work earlier this year. And I’ve heard that a USB memory stick kicking around the office has got yet another virus on it. Gr8.
