April 05, 2003

Virus

Work has been hit hard by a virus - the servers are all down as our IT department (2 people) tries to frantically get rid of the problem. We can't:

• Check in/out source
  
• Test anything in the lab
  
• Get to our shared directories where some of us save our code
  
• Get to the web through the proxy, which despite being a simple Linux box, depends on some part of our network
  

I used to think that computer viruses were harmless little mind games - neat little hacks that exploited errors in popular software and made the companies look foolish when they should for not publishing the ones that they know about. They overall seemed harmless to me and I even enjoyed tracking them down, armed with a good anti-virus program and knowledge of the OS, and getting rid of them. Every once in awhile you can actually get the to the source (as in code) of a virus and they are very interesting in that they are simple. Mostly they rely on inherent properties in the systems that they infect, like how you can share drives and map network addresses. They can also rely on inherent properties of people as well - we use the same password to connect to all our mapped drives and all our web accounts. Only rarely does somebody come up with a clever new way to trick people into spreading them.

So anyway, in the past I have seen viruses as clever little system or psychological hacks. Now, as I see more of them mess up nice people's work, I don't care how clever they are. A simple message to virus writers: use it somewhere else.

April 5, 2003 02:54 AM