OT, but important -- Worm alert in today's New York Times
 

this link was in today's New York Times --

www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp

It details the ways in which you can avoid being hacked by this new bug.

I point it out since we have had a series of bugs relating to MSOffice
functions here in recent days. The Atlanta Federal Reserve and Maryland DMV
had to shut down operations due to the bug.

Jack

I second that.

I've been having DSL trouble recently, and was doing some
troubleshooting with my ISP. Since the normal DSL connection wasn't
working anyway, I disabled my firewall to make it possible for the ISP
to ping me. Later, having forgotten that my firewall was off, I
connected to the web with a dialup connection. Less than 5 minutes into
the session, I got a notice that my system was shutting down due to
something relating to "RPC". When I rebooted the firewall loaded
automatically and caught "msblast.exe" trying to contact the Internet.

So it took less than 5 minutes on a dialup connection without a firewall
to get nabbed.

Msblast.exe, as it turns out, emails MS in an attempt to bog down its
site and make it difficult or impossible for people to download the
security patch MS has developed.

You'll find more good information, and a virus remover, at
http://securityresponse.symantec.com...ster.worm.html.

I was able to download the MS patch in spite of its getting blasted.

Roy Lewallen

John Walton wrote:
this link was in today's New York Times --

www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp

It details the ways in which you can avoid being hacked by this new bug.

I point it out since we have had a series of bugs relating to MSOffice
functions here in recent days. The Atlanta Federal Reserve and Maryland DMV
had to shut down operations due to the bug.

Jack

I second that.

I've been having DSL trouble recently, and was doing some
troubleshooting with my ISP. Since the normal DSL connection wasn't
working anyway, I disabled my firewall to make it possible for the ISP
to ping me. Later, having forgotten that my firewall was off, I
connected to the web with a dialup connection. Less than 5 minutes into
the session, I got a notice that my system was shutting down due to
something relating to "RPC". When I rebooted the firewall loaded
automatically and caught "msblast.exe" trying to contact the Internet.

So it took less than 5 minutes on a dialup connection without a firewall
to get nabbed.

Msblast.exe, as it turns out, emails MS in an attempt to bog down its
site and make it difficult or impossible for people to download the
security patch MS has developed.

You'll find more good information, and a virus remover, at
http://securityresponse.symantec.com...ster.worm.html.

I was able to download the MS patch in spite of its getting blasted.

Roy Lewallen

John Walton wrote:
this link was in today's New York Times --

www.microsoft.com/security/incident/blast.asp

It details the ways in which you can avoid being hacked by this new bug.

I point it out since we have had a series of bugs relating to MSOffice
functions here in recent days. The Atlanta Federal Reserve and Maryland DMV
had to shut down operations due to the bug.

Jack