Survival Time for Unpatched Systems Cut by Half

[Monty J. Harder]

"djgoku" <djgoku at gmail.com> wrote:

> I read another article today in PCWORLD mag, that said they thought
> that a new viri that would use IM clients and be able to spread in

  <Grammatiknazi>'viri' is plural, where the article 'a' indicates singular
number.  Perhaps the words 'kind of' were omitted?</Grammatiknazi>

> seconds instead of minutes or hours. Kinda of crazy to think of that

  About a year ago we had an IM virus going about work.  This thing opens up
IM windows to everyone on your Buddy List saying to check out a web page,
the name of which suggests that Usama Bin Laden had just been captured.  If
you click on the link, you go to what looks like a news site that requires
you to download a plugin before you can access the content on the page.  The
dumbasses at corporate IT shut down the ports that IM accesses, rather than
simply blocking the IP address of the website (then setting up DNS for that
domain name to go to an intranet redirect page telling them the link that
took them there was an indication that the sender's computer was
compromised, etc.)  I emailed the polite suggestion that they do so to the
IT person who sent out the news that they'd blocked all IM and got back the
answer "We're working on doing just that."