Well its seems the Blaster Worm I heard about yesterday wasn't a hoax, but I had nothing to worry about any way as both the machines I use for work were patched and my good old W98/Linux machine was oblivious. Nobody seems to write viruses for W98 anymore :(
The critical update that takes care of the vunerability was released way back in July but it seems 'Critical' just isn't a strong enough word for some (read 'most') people.
I work as the Webmaster for a NZ School with around 1400 students and I guess a couple of hundred staff. About fifty of these staff lease a laptop which they use for work and personal use. I have just spent most of the day crawling through registries of many of these laptops because the owner/users didn't think they needed any critical updates (or claim they didn't know, or just don't care). The worm was realeased onto our network of 400+ W2000 and WXP machines. It didn't get very far and thankfully cleaning it up was relativly easy, BUT it shouldn't have happened and it could have been a lot worse.
Windows XP automatically checks the internet when it is connected and informs users when a critical update is available, not to mention our Network Manager emails all the staff who own a laptop that gets connected to our network, to not only inform them the a critical update is out, but also points them to a location on our network where they can download it in a few seconds.
Again it seems 'Critical' just isn't a strong enough word. I still found several infected computers today and know from the phone calls that there were simalar experiences all over town.
It seems amongst all the spam, banner ads, hoax's, and pop-up windows, people have learnt to filter out a little too much web noise.
6:38:04 PM 
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