Odds & Ends
There's a new windows worm starting to spread in Australia, and it's already hit in my inbox. This one doesn't seem to be so bad, really, with the January 28th expiration date, but yup, chances are there are going to be more variants. Doesn't look pretty.
How to know if you're infected:
Users who suspect their computers may be infected with the virus should look for a file called bbeagle.exe in their Windows System directory. The file disguises itself with Microsoft familiar calculator icon.
On a related note, there's an interesting, and dark, take on the impact of a lot of this stuff in Scott Berinato's "The future of security", over at Computer World. Guess it's been out for a few weeks, but I just saw it due to slashdot.
It's well worth a read, and at it's heart seems to be about the unknown and well-worn term "digital pearl harbor" that will occur at some point, and cause a fundamental shift in the public consciousness regarding digital security. It then tries to prevent what could happen from that outcry. An excerpt:
"We need to distinguish between the mischievous and the malicious," says Darwin John, who served recently (albeit briefly) as CIO of the FBI and is considered one of the godfathers of the CIO profession. "We've tolerated the attacks until now because they're mischievous. The malicious attack will be the one that moves the public consciousness, and it's so much harder to know what that attack will be."
...which is an eloquent way of saying something lots of others have said in the past: we've gotten off really damn easy up till now. Every time something like NIMDA or code red comes out someone says "You know, thank god this thing isn't sending out its copies and then doing the equivalent of $rm -rf $HOME
Mozilla 1.6 is out for OSX. Click to download, it seems to be a nice release. Feels faster, and more stable. It'd be nice to see it using the default Firebird theme, that thing is getting really slick.
Apple released iCal 1.5.2, which is as slow as ever, but they've bowed to the outcries of the users in at least one way, and let them choose whether to use a drawer or a separate window. Yay, that drawer thing was a joke.
Posted by drunkenbatmanJanuary 20, 2004, at 01:36 AM
