"Blasted"
Well, Hewey - my HP laptop - was one of the tens of thousands of machines that got nailed by the MSBlast Worm. He was on the leading edge of the tidal wave - we got hit yesterday (Monday) at 11:30 AM.
I'm attending the CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone, Colorado. CableLabs has a wi-fi network available and there are also numerous vendors on the floor with operational wi-fi access points. At some point yesterday morning, I inadvertantly attached to an infected peer-to-peer (ad hoc) wi-fi network and got nailed. At the time, I thought the timed shutdowns were the result of a corrupted registry which in turn was the result of a very unstable wi-fi network. Yesterday morning, the news was not yet out on the worm.
So, it wasn't until this morning in a security presentation when the worm was discussed and the RPC connection was described that it dawned on me that my corrupted registry was actually the MSBlast worm. Fortunately, GCI's corporate help desk walked me through the worm purge process.
So, you ask, why didn't a responsible tech person like yourself load Microsoft's patch when it was announced in July? Well, you see, I have a very low opinion of Microsoft's software updates - they're both buggy and often lock out previously functioning 3rd party non-Microsoft software. Because of the 3rd party issues, I've never even loaded XP Service Pack 1. And to install the RPC (MSBlast) security patch, Service Pack 1 must be installed. sigh...However, it is now clear that I will have to install SP1 and the patch and deal with the 3rd party software fallout. As my boss stated, "It is a conspiracy."
6:58:07 PM 
|
|
