RE: Possible new virus?

[Brian Dunbar <Brian.Dunbar () plexus com>]

Harris Samuel W PORT [mailto:HarrisSW () mail ports navy mil] on Wednesday,
September 10, 2003 5:46 AM said;

> > Chris Berry [mailto:compjma () hotmail com] on Tuesday, September 09, 2003
4:21 PM said;

> > > From: Wirefire Systems Administrator <sysadmin () wirefire com>
[snip]
> > > cpu cooling fan is malfunctioning
[snip]
> > > Accompanying this is a high-pitched tone from the PC speaker.

> > Ahem...Perhaps a warning tone that YOUR COOLING SYSTEM HAS FAILED??
This is

> > not a security question, I'm not sure how it made it on to the list, but

> > please take it to a hardware support forum.  Most likely the fan is full
of 
> > crud and has overloaded the fan header, try cleaning the fan, and
swapping 
> > to a different header.

> He said it happened to several (3 I think) different computers. Not likely
> to be a simultaneous failure on 3 different machines.

It could be likely, we don't have enough information to say.  How many
machines are in the sample?  Was the error message present before the
problem?  Perhaps the fans really are failed, or are failing.  Or the BIOS
could be reading the fan health incorrectly.  If you support 10,000 systems
(example) then the odds that 3 of them will have failures that look related
are pretty high.

Example; I had a shop of 10 systems.  Differnet brands of PC.  Video cards
in five of them failed over the span of a month.  The PCs were different,
but the specs had called for the same model of video card, which was what
had failed.

Chris has a point.  I'll add to it.  While meaning no disprespect to the
orignal poster, he may well be a naif to security, but he shouldn't be a
naif to basic troubleshooting.

Brian

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