bitsconsultants.com e-mail newsletter

September 2003

I'll just go eat worms.

It's unusual that we get such an onslaught of computer virus activity all at the same time, but last month was as bad as we've seen for network worms. There were three major worms, two of which took advantage of the Microsoft security flaw that we talked about in the last newsletter. They were code named "blaster" (or "mblast"), "welchia", and "sobig.f".

Blaster took advantage of various known flaws to replicate through the Internet causing Windows XP machines to reboot and Windows 2000 computers to become unstable. As of this writing, the FBI has arrested a Minnesota teenager in connection with the blaster outbreak. It seems doubtful that this individual is the progenitor of the virus, but rather a copycat coder, only slightly altering the code of the original blaster worm to create a variant named blaster.b.

Welchia seems to have been a misguided attempt to automatically repair machines infected with blaster.

Sobig.f, is the latest incarnation in the sobig family and it sends itself out through e-mail using sender spoofing to disguise the actual computer forwarding out the worm. There has been widespread speculation in recent days that the sobig virus family is designed to create a network of infected computers that can be used to deliver spam e-mail. Presumably, the use of this network and all the addresses contained on infected machines could be sold to advertisers. I'm not sure I understand why any legitimate advertiser would want to risk association with this, and also I don't see how such an association could possibly be kept secret, so it sounds kind of far-fetched to me. So far, each version of sobig has followed quickly on the heels of it's predecessor. If sobig.g follows the pattern, we can expect it to be released soon after sobig.f expires on September 10th.

Apparently many of you are paying attention to our security tips, because we did not receive a single notification from any of our existing customers reporting that they had been infected with any of these worms. 

Tech News Highlights

SCO battles IBM.

The Unix world is seeing a good old-fashioned barroom brawl as SCO and IBM exchange legal motions. The fight is over whether IBM violated SCO patents with certain code that it contributed to the open-source operating system Linux. Unsurprisingly, The Linux and open-source community has jumped in solidly in support of IBM. Industry experts say that this is nothing for Linux users to be concerned about, and the lawsuits shouldn't keep anyone from going forward with plans to adopt or use the operating system.

UT and IBM to build super-computing chip.

The University of Texas and IBM have received a grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to build a computer chip based on a new architecture that promises the ability to complete one trillion operations a second. This is comparable to the capabilities of present-day super computers. Prototypes of the new architecture may be produced within three or four years.

Does spam pay?

The depressing news is in. Spamming is definitely lucrative. A recent security glitch at a merchant selling performance enhancing pills via spam e-mail revealed that the merchant had received orders for more than $500,000 worth of product in just a few days.

Ask Randy

Q: I can't run the defrag program on my computer. When I try to run it, I get the error message "Drive's Contents Have Changed: Restarting..." over and over. What can I do to keep this from happening? 

A: Thankfully, Microsoft has taken care of this problem in Windows 2000 and XP but it can still be an issue in Windows 98 and Windows ME. The best way to fix this is to restart you computer in safe mode and then run the defrag tool. To restart your computer in safe mode, follow these steps.

1. Restart your computer using the restart option on the start menu.

2. While your computer restarts, press and hold the CTRL key until the Windows 98 Startup menu is displayed.

3. Select "Safe Mode" from the Startup menu, and then press ENTER.

After restarting in safe mode, you should be able to complete the disk defrag.

Tip of the Month

If you spend any amount of time looking for things on the Internet, and you use Internet Explorer, get the new Google toolbar. When you load it, it adds a search box that you can use to search the web quickly and easily. It also contains a good pop-up blocker that is easy to use and works great. You can find the toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com.

Places on the Web

Austin Public Library

You can search the catalog online, order and renew books, get books transferred from one branch to another and find out about all the events at the library. A very useful website for readers.

Find Your Blind Spot

More than you ever wanted to know about your blind spot. 

Dexter's Laboratory Bot Brigade

Flash game that's a combination of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" and "Space Invaders".