[plug] Bugbear/B (Kai/Ben)

[Leon Brooks]

On Tue, 10 Jun 2003 14:11, Kai Jones wrote:
> A friend of mine in Perth got his desktop machine infected, he runs
> PC-Cillan...I think that program sucks but he's paid for it for a
> year so he's using it. Even though he's got it set to auto update and
> auto-run itself at midnight every night it still didn't pick up the
> infection, I got a virus infected email from him yesterday, checked
> the headers and called him and that was the only way he found out his
> machine was infected.

> Having a virus scanner and keeping it up-to-date is essential
> Having a virus scanner that actually works (ie Vet) is just as
> critical !

Good choice of examples, Kai. Last week I fixed up two Vet-protected 
machines, one w2k, one w98, that had both been infected. A few 
revisions ago, both machines stopped successfully auto-updating (no 
error displayed, of course) - wouldn't even manually "auto-update." I 
had to pull the magic numbers out of the registry, go to the web site, 
pull down the EXE by hand and re-install it.

Ben, my wife got (and was puzzled by) a BugBear.B on her Mandrake Linux 
box (KMail on KDE), and was in the middle of writing a rude email back 
to the (imposter) sender when I found her. I don't think WINE's up to 
running BugBear.B yet, so I haven't scanned her machine. If she'd been 
running MS-Windows, the little Billion under the window would've been 
lit up like Christmas by then.

It's not fair to blame the user. The user shouldn't have to know. When 
we get around to (fingers down throat) Internet-enabled refrigerators 
and stuff, do you expect Jane Housewife to put "check appliance 
antivirus updates" on her shopping list?

"Q: What do I do if my 'fridge crashes and the door turns blue?"

"A: Open the main door, turn the temperature dial to Min, hold in the 
light-switch button and head-butt the freezer door. Restore the 
temperature dial to its original setting. If this fails, unplug the 
power for ten seconds." (-:

Cheers; Leon