Yet another VIRUS ALERT

[Mike Field]

In the last five days I've received seven emails purportedly from Microsoft, each having an attachment containing the SWEN_A worm. Watch out for it.

All the messages but one are in html, with the MS logo, some genuine MS links, and other things in them that make them look pretty genuine.

The odd one email (the first one listed below) was in plain text, advising me of the failure to deliver a message to an email address.

In each case, the infected attachment is 106KB long.

In different messages, the Sender field has contained --

Microsoft Network System
Microsoft Program Security Department
Network Security Division
Microsoft Security Department
Network Security Department
Microsoft Security Section
Microsoft

the messaages have been addressed to --

Inet recipient
Commercial Customer
Commercial Client
MS Customer
Commercial Partner
Commercial Consumer
Customer

and the subject has been --

Abort Message
Latest Upgrade
current net critical patch
Internet Critical Update
latest net critical update
Network Critical Upgrade
Latest Microsoft Pack

Keep an eye out for them, and if you get any delete them without opening the attachment.
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[ 09-27-2003, 06:54 AM: Message edited by: Mike Field ]

[Oyvind Snibsoer]

Regarding this mail, and other like it, it should be noted that Microsoft NEVER distributes updates, or any other software AFAIK, by email.

[Mike Field]

Quite right, Oyvind. Thanks.

Hey, what happened to the Ø ?

smile.gif

[Meerkat]

An industry group, admittedly with anti-MS leanings, has declared that the wide-spread use of MS software constitutes a threat to National Security. Meanwhile, they're building an aircraft carrier to be run on Windows "Son of NT".

"I"m sorry Mr. President, we didn't mean to hit that cruise ship. The navigation computer had an unrecoverable exception, threw the blue screen of death and, as you know sir, it takes 5 minutes to reboot".

[Oyvind Snibsoer]

I updated my profile (new email), and the system refused let me save with my old username :(

[Meerkat]

That's probably because the filter that prevents having punctuation or non-alphanumeric characters in user names considers your O to be a non-alpha character. You know it's not and I know it's not, but computers don't know - they do what they're programmed to do - usually, and especially when not programmed by an MS programmer ;)

[Oyvind Snibsoer]

Actually, if the board is or had been running on any recent MS software, it wouldn't have mattered what letters I used since it's all Unicode then.

A friend of mine makes new software for AWACS planes. They work on old, tried and tested Unix versions.

Which, BTW, is all he has ever been willing to tell me about what he does...

(Edited because I posted and didn't see that meerkat had posted and I wanted to make it look more comprehensible because I wanted to respoond to his last post. Is that clear :confused: )

[ 09-27-2003, 05:33 PM: Message edited by: Oyvind Snibsoer ]

[Meerkat]

The forum software may or may not be running on an MS OS, but it's likely that the forum software progammers thought in terms of ASCII - and US locale at that. ("Locale" is something in the C and C++ programming languages that determines how some character processing (matching, sorting) routines work: generally, if you change it from the default locale, it just screws things up though.)

[Mike Field]

Ah. That's what it was, eh? Bummer.

Talking of aircraft software --

At a recent software engineering management course in the US, the participants were given an awkward question to answer. "If you had just boarded an airliner and discovered that your team of programmers had been responsible for the flight control software how many of you would disembark immediately?"

Among the ensuing forest of raised hands, only one man sat motionless. When asked what he would do, he replied that he would be quite content to stay onboard.

With his team's software, he said, the plane was unlikely to even taxi as far as the runway, let alone take off.

Not your mate I hope, Øyvind?
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