Virus Hits Client

One of my clients has been hit with the new MSBlaster virus that affects Windows operating systems. From everything I've read, the virus doesn't do any damage to the user's machine. But for some reason I'm unable to launch Visual Basic. And a bunch of other common tasks like copy-and-pasting aren't working. So while there may not be any permanent damage, there certainly is something going on. Fortunately, these problems only exist on the computers managed by my client.

What I can't understand is how these things spread. Is there something tricky about keeping Windows software up to date? A patch has been available since July. Anti-virus software is supposed to update itself so why didn't it? And firewalls are supposed to keep unneeded ports closed. I do all of this on computers and laptops that I own and I've never been infected by a virus.

Can it be that having hundreds or thousands of computers in your care makes such seemingly simple tasks impossible? I'm just glad that this virus wasn't destructive. If it had been, I can only imagine how much data my client would've lost.

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1 Comment

  1. Your client's security probably has gaping holes in it to support bad decisions in legacy software or processes.

    I was at a client site a few years back when the Nimda worm hit. I had 3 computers on my desk; 2 desktop machines (the client's) and one laptop (mine). Client had a subscription to Symantec AntiVirus but default security settings were low-average for Windows 2000. I was behind on manually updating my virus definitions, but my machine was tweaked to unusually high security. All the client's machines on their network were infected, while my laptop was fine.

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