What a day
Well at noon today our network at work got hit with the zotob worm. What is this you ask? Here’s a Google Search. It managed to take down EVERY computer at work, except the lc/ms machines because they are running NT and 2K. So it didnt stop my whole afternoon but did make things more difficult. Whats crazy is that I overheard so many ppl at work going “darn hacker kids, if i get my hands on them…blah blah blah..” WOW Microsoft has ppl wrapped right around their finger. While its true that no OS is safe, the monopolistic hold that MS has on the desktop (both in OS and productivity products, i.e. IE, Office, Outlook) all of which, along with most other programs written for it, have way to my access to low level processes that can really fsck up a system. This is where angry users should be pointing their collective fingers. Yes there are fewer Mac and Linux installations on the net, making them lower targets, looking at the numbers its appears that quite a bit of web servers run some flavor of apache. Yes you can run apache on MS windows, I would venture to guess that most apache installations are on some flavor of gnu/linux (or BSD even?). So why not attack those, maybe its to difficult do to the strength of the underlying OS? Possibly. So why were all these places affected. Why didnt they patch? Why didnt my workplace patch. Well that is due to the fact that any patch must go through a huge process of being tested and made double sure that no critical apps crash becuase of it. This takes some time. Of course now that it hit they are applying the patch like crazy. Again, we shoudl point at microsoft, a patch should not change a system so much that basic programs stop working correctly. Thanks M$ what a mess.