Greetings.

As if all of the time, energy and annoyance caused were not enough. I am slightly gratified to see that most of the donations really reflect the crime. Link

Yup, $97.15 is really going to help "stick it to the man."

Yeah I thought a one cent donation would be a good idea at first, but I'd rather be able to make a donation that indicates he owes me money...
I don't quite understand how/why they are defending this guy...

Perhaps a PayPal invoice for time spent clearing up after the worm?

All this stuff, to me, is like subway graffiti. Sure, it's still vandalism, and I see it, but it doesn't affect me in any way. You guys need to get computers that aren't big security holes. Or at least are something more than them.

Well I haven't been hit by any worm, *knock on wood* I check for updates at least weekly. But to claim he is delivering a wake-up call is like someone going down to the local Kwik-E-Mart, throwing a rock through the window and then claiming the police need to step up enforcement in the neighborhood because of the vandalism.

In reply to:

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Sure, it's still vandalism, and I see it, but it doesn't affect me in any way.

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Are you sure? Do you never get frustrated with the treacle-like pace of the overloaded links on the net that are trying to transport worm traffic as well as your valuable data? Never get mail bounced (or worse, dropped) for no good reason?

On the net, we all suffer from others' security weaknesses, like it or not. Like you, I've never been directly affected by malware, and take reasonable precautions to avoid it (choice of OS being an important start). But a surprising amount of infrastructure is vulnerable to attack (from denial-of-service upwards), and when it is attacked, conscientious netizens suffer degradation as well as the reckless ones.

If it's a premier account, a 1 cent donation will cost them 28 cents, I assume... I wonder if that's true. If so, I'd gladly donate one cent.

Okay. It doesn't directly affect me in any way. I end up having to pay for subway vandalism, too, but the cost is hidden.

to claim he is delivering a wake-up call is like someone going down to the local Kwik-E-Mart, throwing a rock through the window

It'd be even more like it if the two adjoining windows were already broken and the sign was graffitoed.

At least one person donated 1¢ several times, so that must have been his thinking. However, their paypal account has been closed, apparently.

You guys need to get computers that aren't big security holes.

...or a hardware (or Linux or BSD) firewall and a virus scanner.

Bandaids.

Trust me: the best firewalls and virus checkers are no match for sheer stupidity inside a very large corporation. We did not get hit with this one, but it is amazing how, even after lots of warnings, threads, forced AV software upgrades and dat file pushes, some idiots will still click on any attachment that they see in email or on a web site. If it was only them that suffered, that would be one thing. But this has a way of spreading and causing DoS.

But this has a way of spreading and causing DoS

Yep, one lousy windows box infected with Sasser managed to DoS the router for one of the T1s in my office for the better part of a day until our desktop support guy found and defected it. Apparently the router was spending so much time dropping the broadcast packets from sasser that it was basically overloaded and not passing any other traffic.

-Mike

Keeping our defenses running is part of my job
Although automated updates, forced software installation of AV and firewall progs keeps our internal infection rate to pretty much zero.
The stats from the email AV is pretty scary though, 150K inbound viruses in the last few months alone. That excludes the web and ip based ones that the firewall kills off.

This is quite unbelievable. Here's me without work for two years despite two patents and 20 years of experience in software and electronics, and this scrotty little git gets (admittedly little) money for nothing! I can't even get my b***** kicks for free - the hard disk on Erik packed up two weeks ago probably due to an immensely bad landing in Bristol a few weeks ago - thanks a lot, Mr. Pilot) and I can't afford to get another. Ridiculous, this little twerp should be shot out of hand.

Sorry, I don't feel too subtle today, guys & gals. Too many late nights.