The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5) - Microsoft says 8 million machines compromised

Microsoft says 8 million machines compromised

http://news.com.com/2100-7349-5184439.html?tag=nl

later upped to 9.5 mil
http://news.com.com/2100-1002-5201807.html?tag=nl

These are the MINIMUM amount of infected machines. I hope the stock price shoots to zero and MS has to spen 50B build something decent.

"In fact, the worm hit so hard that the company quickly asked some development teams to stop work on the software giant's next version of Windows and create an interim update, known as Service Pack 2, to enhance the security of Windows XP"

Looks like L'Horn is s l i p p i n g . . .

Please when somebody asks you what type of pc is best for them. Tell them anything but Windows.

Unfathomable
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Old news. So a lot of people didn't patch. Shocker. That's a 9 month old worm. You think Longhorn is slipping NOW because of a worm that's 9 months old?

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Saturday, May 1, 2004

Who is 8 million a surprising number to? I'm surprised it's not higher.

Matt
Saturday, May 1, 2004

If you don't patch soon, you get screwed big time period.

[Disclaimer I don't work for Microsoft, Philo does]

Jason
Saturday, May 1, 2004

One of my webservers still get hit with worms from two years back. This really gets me going. The offenders should be disconnected by their ISP, then told to clean up their boxes, whatever way they wish. They then get charged heavily for a reconnection, and if they offend again, repeat the process.

fw
Sunday, May 2, 2004

Patching is not as easy as it sounds. My brother tried to patch his box but he gets hit as soon as he goes on line and then the box shuts down. He reinstalled XP, and went online again to get the patches, and boom. Shutdown.

Eric Debois
Sunday, May 2, 2004

How about a firewall then? Or does this particular brand of worm slip through firewalls somehow?

Chris Nahr
Sunday, May 2, 2004

When I repave my boxes:

Install item #1: Operating System
Install item #2: ZoneAlarm
Install item #3: Network cable

Do your brother a favor and go download a free firewall like ZoneAlarm for him. Anybody who's online w/o a firewall is just... well, begging for trouble. I don't care WHAT OS you're running.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Sunday, May 2, 2004

Yeah, Im installing some stuff for him right now. (Firewall)

It appears the virus diddnt re-infect as I had thought, It was the bloody "restore" CD that diddnt clean out the previous installation. How fu**ing retarded is that?

Eric Debois
Sunday, May 2, 2004

One tning that is quite common is for System Restore on XP to keep the viruses for the restore points, so if your system goes down, and you choose an old enough restore you might find you're with the virus and without the patch.

Bllaster is incredibly easy to get infected by. I connected a machine to the college network a month ago to transfer some files. It immediately got infected and then immediately infected the other 45 machines it was connected to in the room. When I asked the college sysadmin why this hadn't been cleaned nine months ago as I thought it had he told me that it was the ATM switches that were infected, and Marconi no longer supported them.

Stephen Jones
Sunday, May 2, 2004

And why did you connect an un-secured machine to a foreign network?

Nate Silva
Tuesday, May 4, 2004

"And why did you connect an un-secured machine to a foreign network?"

Yes, the gall, thinking you could just connect a computer to a network. He could have if it was a Mac.

Uncle Cracker
Tuesday, May 4, 2004