So, my husband (who is in Saudi Arabia) and I deserve to be cut off from our only means of communication because someone opened this message on one of the network of unclassified computers he uses to e-mail me? Aren’t you fucking superior.
And I hope they catch “spyder” and feed him to giant Iranian goat eating cockroaches.
SingleDad is on target here… Why in the world would you want any e-mail attachment to execute automatically anyway? It’s the same problem with the Word and Excel macro viruses. If you absolutely have to have that feature, at least put it in as something you’d have to enable–not the default setting.
Before I hijack this…I didn’t get the virus…oh boy don’t I feel left out! :rolleyes:
[hijack]
Okay so maybe I am a little slow about this, but Brian, you work for BMG? Could you make them cut my membership off so I can stop being sucked into their sounds-like-a-deal-but-we-will-get-your-money-somehow deals?
I am going broke buying cds!!! No really, I just wasn’t aware you worked for the company I am keeping in business with my meagre little paychecks. Hehehe. I know you probably haven’t a damned thing to do with the music club…but I felt like ranting since it was all I could do not to buy some more cds yesterday.
[/hijack]
Whoa - I never said people were idiots - that was milroyj.
Not everyone is a VB programmer and it is totally understandable why people fell for this virus.
If you’d care to reread my post, milroyj, you’ll see I said “If you’re lucky”, not “If you’re not an idiot”, and our hero still gets screwed by some nitwit with an itchy trigger finger.
If you’re going to insult people, at least leave my name off of it, assmaster.
LouisB,
So do you often receive emails from cow-orkers with a subject line of “I LOVE YOU”? Where the hell do you work?
Idiot.
Lucretia,
No not superior, just not freaking stupid. I had two of these emails in my inbox at work Thursday morning before I even heard about the virus. I deleted them. No problem.
No wonder your husband is in Saudi Arabia.
douglips,
In your earlier post, your first point was valid. Why would anyone you don’t know be sending you an email that said I LOVE YOU? Most likely it’s some come-on for an adult website, or some other spam. Why open it?
ass-servant
SingleDad:
Microsoft didn’t build in this feature. You have to double-click .vbs files to run them.
Hey, milroyj, I often receive emails from coworkers with all sorts of attachments, all of them supposedly prescreened by virus detection software.
Asshole.
I have a couple of thoughts on this:
If a hacker writes an e-mail, and no one opens it, does anyone get affected?
None of this would be as big a problem if Word/Excel didn’t have VB built in as a scripting language. IMHO, that allowed the virus to kind of go ‘under the radar’ for a lot of people. If this was compiled in C++ and came across as an .exe, would as many people have opened it?
Personally, I don’t open any attachments in Outlook I don’t recognize, even if it is from my friends. I have called them in the past to ensure that it was really them that sent an attachment, instead of an ‘address book ripoff’. I’ve never had this problem with AOL, Lotus Notes, Hotmail, et. al., since none of them have so many glaring and obvious exploits in them as Outlook does.
While I do feel bad for those who got nuked, I can’t put the blame 100% on the hacker. If you received a package in the mail, addressed from someone you knew, that had a big red button that said ‘press me’ would you do it?
-sb
Look, I’m sorry. It wasn’t supposed to spread this far. I didn’t count on the preponderance of people who will just open any-old attachment.
I wouldn’t have put it in the wild at all, but that’s really the only way to ever be sure it worked, right?
Again, I apologize.
…and featuring Joe Pesci as “Satan”!!
You didn’t think I was serious, did you? Hell no. I’d never write in vbscript.
I’d like to mention something here for all of you who considered someone ‘stupid’ for opening an ‘ILOVEYOU’ type attachment. A friend of mine got this virus because Mother’s Day is coming up, and she received an e-mail apparently from her daughter with the ‘ILOVEYOU’ attachment. Naturally she opened it! I guess it was stupid of her to assume that her daughter had sent her a special ‘I love you, Mom’ letter!
Some people do have other people who love them, and actually send them notes, letters, e-cards, etc. saying so. Also, some of the later versions (according to McAfee) say, instead, ‘JOKE’ or even ‘VIRUSALERT’. Sure, you shouldn’t open something like this from a total stranger - but many people who ‘caught’ the virus did so at work, where you are more likely to open an attachment from someone you don’t know well, and then passed it on to their friends/family.
Before you start calling people ‘stupid’, yank your head out of that fishbowl you’re living in and realized that the world is full of people who live differently from you.
Here’s a real-life scenario, you clueless twit.
Person returns to work following a hospital stay, and there is this note from someone he knows. It’s not “stupid” to think it could have something to do with his hospital stay. However…
Not being ignorant about such things, he scans it with the **current **signatures of Norton Anti-Virus. There WERE NO SIGNATURES for this worm, so the file checks out clean.
The script didn’t appear to do anything, but being attentive, he notices that “something” is going on and immediately powers off his PC, but not before it sends out some emails.
The mail goes out on our network, where a few people make a reasonable assumption that the person is acknowledging well-wishes from his hospital stay. These people know better than to open executables, but don’t know what a .VBS is.
So spare me your after-the-fact superior attitude that YOU’d never be so dumb to fall for that. I didn’t happen to open my messages either and wasn’t infected, but I have enough sense to see how easy it was to happen, even when taking proper precautions.
Make sure you run the symantec script that checks and cleans your system of this worm (milroyj ONLY, readers).
The anecdotal stories about people “coming back from the hospital” or “mothers thinking they’ve received a Mother’s Day present” and opening the emails are cute and all, but come on! This virus was spread through corporations and governments, like Fortune 500s, the US Defense Dept, and the British Parliament. If one works at any of these places, one should not be receiving emails (apparently from coworkers, since the virus uses the address books found on these email servers) saying I LOVE YOU. If your’re at work, and receive an email that appears to be from a coworker that says I LOVE YOU, you have one of the following:
Of course, one could be using their work email account to receive personal email, but that would be theft of resources, so one shouldn’t be doing that either.
Sheesh! It’s not that hard! I had two of the “Joke” variation viruses in my inbox again today and I deleted them. No problem.
Milroyj, some of the people I work with I have known for twenty years and more because we are fortunate enough to work for a family owned organization. We have seen that organization grow into a multi-million dollar per year concern. We have helped that growth and we have benefitted from that growth. We are treated as if we are members of the family that owns the company. Hell yes, many of us DO love each other. And we are not above letting each other know that we value each other.
You must be a miserably unhappy person. Even so, I will say: Fuck off and die, you self righteous asshole.
I’m sure you’ve never used an office pen and notepad to make a little grocery list either, or take down a personal note? If a friend calls you at work, is that ‘theft of resources’ too? What about taking a shit on the company crapper? You could have done that at home as well.
:rolleyes:
Or, 3. An “inspirational” message.
I get these all day. If God loves me so much, can’t He just go to the Hallmark store Himself and send me a card?
inkblot
Ah, the blissfully ignorant. His argument has fallen apart, yet he persists, flopping on the bank like a dying flounder.
In order to make your case, you’ve narrowed your view to the only two possibilities that tend to support your argument. So, everyone works for a large corporation or government. Like you, they have no friends, lovers or sense of humor and do nothing with their PC’s or lives but busines-related activity.
Here’s a couple clues, but I can’t keep holding your hand through this:
People have PCs AT HOME, for pure fun and entertainment. Their address books contain home and business addresses for people that they know.
Everyone that has or uses a PC is not a computing professional. They are smarter, more talented and generally more valuable than you. Their PC is a tool, but they devote their energies to their main focus and don’t study every computer concept. I didn’t see where you explained how someone who scanned a file in NAV before opening it is “stupid” (before news of this was out, by the way).
Personal emails from work “theft of company resource”? I’ll bet you were the life of the only party you were ever invited to. Personal email happens to be allowed at my company, and people even send notes and IRCs to each other. (Good comments, Coldfire. Maybe dipshit’s attitude comes from his having to “hold it in” all day until he can take a dump on his own time.) Actually, we should cut him a break here–that was just a pathetic attempt on his part to shore up a failed position.
The point we’re making and the reason why you’re such a jerk is that WE KNOW it’s easy to delete a message. We DID do that. We’re just not self-righteous, pompous creeps to suggest that everyone is stupid that didn’t. This was UNKNOWN when it happened. People rely on anti-virus software (maybe too much)to protect them from these things. Some people are plenty stupid, most are just complacent. This worm was a NEW concept (to most users), with NO KNOWN SIGNATURE and NO ADVANCE WARNING (as is the case with most major attacks). THAT’s why it spread so quickly, not because you’re smarter than the rest of the world, which I can guarantee is not the case. Sheeesh, it’s not that hard.
Jerk.
From our network folks:
In other words, simply having the preview pane on your Outlook on (and I don’t think anyone who has their Outlook set up this way is stupid, even if I don’t) can help you spread a virus if it is embedded in an HTML document.
I don’t know if this would have caused the ILOVEYOU virus to spread, but it is possible for the future, and one less reason to call people “stupid” for spreading it.
Yer pal,
Satan
I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
One month, 13 hours, 50 minutes and 57 seconds.
1223 cigarettes not smoked, saving $152.88.
Life saved: 4 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes.
Good point, Satan. The ILOVEYOU worm could not be activated by a preview pane. You did have to open the attachment, which some virus authorities considered fairly lame.
When this thing started happening on my network, we were at first unsure if the preview would launch it. There was no information available on it yet and websites were jammed with people hitting them.
When we got a chance to see the script and what it did, that was the prevailing view–that this didn’t launch just by previewing, but it wouldn’t be a very big step to use an HTML method to make that very thing happen.
It’s not the ILOVEYOU itself, but the possible variants that keep me awake at night.