June/July 2001 Online Publication

	return to table of contents	New President Spreads Virus by Addalou Davis So, it is Wednesday morning. Beautiful day out. Hardly any traffic. Turn on the computer. Get my coffee.Open Groupewise and begin my day. A friend has transferred from a high tech school in California to a branch campus of that school up in Washington. I know how excited she is about the transfer as we have discussed how lucky she is to get to live in Seattle. One of my emails is from her and the subject is HOMEPAGE. I open it and the message is "You've got to see this page, it is way cool." Now you know the background - this is a high tech school, right? I'm thinking their website must be something really special and I'm interested, so I open it. My computer starts going bonkers. This REALLY disgusting porn stuff starts flashing on my screen. The little address book from my groupwise opens up and starts sending this email to everyone in it, (including three list serves), people in Japan, people in France, people in England. My phone starts ringing. My friend at Georgetown Law School calls and asks if I know my computer has a virus. I had figured that out, thank you very much. My friend from Southwestern Law e-mails me to ask if I didn't know any better than to open that attachment. A lender rep from Boston calls to tell me I wrecked her laptop. Don DeLee is working on the computer while the phone is ringing off the hook: Alaska, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon, California (of course). I quit answering the phone. Then the e-mails start coming in from people who opened it and it started sending HOMEPAGE to their address book (which of course I am in). 135, 172, 168 delete, delete, delete, can't keep up. I get a message from Finaid-L: "Just for the record, this is one of the reasons we don't allow attachments to be distributed through Finaid-L." Slap my wrist. Then people start e-mailing me asking if I actually sent that stuff. Oh no! I had to tell them if they got it open it was sending it out to all the people in their e-mail address book. I am totally mortified. Then I start getting e-mails from people saying they couldn't open it would I send it in another format. I answer saying DON'T OPEN THAT!!!! A friend who left EdFund (the California Student Loan guarantor) to go to work for USA Group (another loan guarantor), answers that message saying that if the Sacramento County DA comes to haul me off in chains, he will start a bail or legal defense fund for me. It is now 4:30 p.m. I'm down to 56 deletes so it is slowing down. Here is valuable information sent by the owner of the Finaid-L list and I quote: "The best virus protection is to know what you are opening." A virus will arrive, usually from someone you know, with a fairly generic message. The attachment is the giveaway. Attachments with .vbs (Virtual Basic Script) should never be opened. The other commonly problematic extension is .exe. There are many, many .exe programs shared by the Internet community. Every one of them probably represents some degree of risk if you open it, hence the reason we all need to be absolutely certain of the content and originator. Other popular attachments are pictures. They're usually JPG, GIF, or BMP. As far as I know, they contain no executable code and are safe to open." Whew - that's a relief - I open those all the time!!!!!! So beware - some insidious people with no life to speak of are out there needing to get their kicks by wrecking our day. And I can vouch for a totally wrecked day! The IT department now calls me "Virus Lady." Why do you suppose they would do that?
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