Re: Blackworm: those who forget the past...

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

Date sent:              Sat, 28 Jan 2006 07:55:27 -0500
From:                   TheGesus <thegesus () gmail com>

> Michelangelo Fiasco: a Historical Timeline

We were, in 1992, a) completely media unsavvy, and b) a victim of our own 
success.  There were many examples of huge numbers of Michelangelo infections 
being caught and disinfected in the weeks leading up to March 6.  We should have 
been prepared, on the day, with the stories of how many computers we saved.  (I 
think it was NJIT that had 3,000 infected machines, which, at the time, must have 
been just about the sum total number of machines on campus.  Which were 
discovered and cleaned just before the deadline.)

Then there was my baby brother, entrepreneur that he is.  He went around pooh-
poohing the Michelangelo stories to all his clients, until I finally (a few days 
before the dealine) gave him a copy of F-Prot.  Whereupon he found out that his 
machine was infected, and went and checked out his minister's computer, and 
found *it* infected (my baby brother had been doing some work for the church), 
and went and checked the church's computer, and found it was infected.  And, the 
next day, who got his picture in the paper?  (Hint: *not* the author of "Robert 
Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses.")

(There were also the unknowing.  In the months following March 6 I heard the 
same story over and over again.  "Oh, no, we didn't have any Michelangelo 
infections.  But, you know, it was strange, we had a hard disk failure that day ...")

> They fail to mention McAfee IPO'd his company shortly after the
> Michelangelo hype-a-thon.

This was also true.  I also remember both Symantec and Central Point releasing 
free Michelangelo disinfectors that *only* checked for Mikey, but *appeared* to 
check for everything else ...

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca      slade () victoria tc ca      rslade () sun soci niu edu
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is
constantly making exciting discoveries.                - A. A. Milne
http://victoria.tc.ca/techrev    or    http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~rslade
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