This is an official warning on Melissa and Happy 99 "viruses" from your list-master at Mall-Net, and an explanation of what these things do, and how to protect yourself.
Whatever you do DO NOT open any attachments! EVER!!! Not from trusted friends, not from strangers! It is spreading, and have affected well over 100,000 computers according to the evening the PBS News Hour. Others are already saying that several corporations have in excess of 60,000 of their own computers affected -- in EACH corporation!
By 3/24/99, We were already seeing the effects on several computer related professional lists I belong to. We are losing OVER TWO THIRDS of the mail on those lists, and what mail makes it out, is delayed for several hours. I think PBS's estimates are very low.
Technically, Melissa and Happy99 are worms, not viruses. They attach themselves to your computer when you open an attachment you received via e-mail or via floppy disk. MS Word, in the default settings, automatically executes anything that you open, and that is how they get in. These two worms don't damage your computer much; but what they do is far worse. Like any bacteria or virus that infects a cell, computer worms use the mechanics of your computer to reproduce themselves. They do this by sending copies of themselves over your LAN and now, over the internet to people whom you trust and interact with every day.
As alternative Physicians, you may know that yogurt is stiff because of the good bacterial cells that grow in the media, milk, till all the cells are pressed up tightly next to each other. In yogurt, that is good. Now imagine that happening in a patient's blood stream with something less flexible, and far more numerous than blood cells. The blood would become too thick for the heart to pump. Without the oxygen transport provided by moving blood, the patient dies.
Worms are like that, turning your network into the equivalent of tightly packed yogurt that can not flow, packing the disk drives and cables with information packets containing nothing but copies of the worms. The network dies. And if the corporate corpus does not have other communications networks, like phone and snail-mail, the corporate corpus dies in a similar manner. Today, we depend on the speed of electronic messaging for e-mail and other automatic computer to computer communications. Telephones and snail-mail are just too slow.
DO NOT EVER OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS!!!
> Are you sure you don't have the Melissa virus?
Our "pasta report" error was just a typo in a file that said "prepare this report" and then "send this report". It didn't do the first; but did the second. So it sent the pasta report to two organizations that were supposed to get other reports. That was ordinary human error, and I was the human who made it. It wasn't Melissa.
Some ten to fifteen years ago, an IBM employee wrote a simple program that sent a holiday greeting message to everyone who's e-mail address he had, over their network, along with a copy of itself. By accident, he let it auto-execute when the recipient looked at it. It then copied itself to everyone the recipient knew. This was one of the first worms. In a day or two, IBM's network became loaded with holiday messages, and gelled like yogurt. And like a blood stream full of yogurt, all business traffic stopped. IBM as a global corporate body, could no longer coordinate it's movements, because a LOT of IBM's message traffic is automatic messages coordinating deliveries and manufacturing on a global scale. They had to shut down IBM's world wide network, and some manufacturing for two days to clean everything up, costing IBM many millions of dollars! IBM learned, and made sure e-mail could not automatically execute itself.
That kind of vulnerability, automatic execution of macro files, exists today in Microsoft Word. When you open an MS Word document, the default is to execute the macros. Like the IBM worm, these worms send copies of themselves as an attachment to an e-mail, to many of the people whom you know, and who trust you. As the worm does this, the worm rigs your computer to automatically execute any copy of themselves your computer receives. Contagion spreads like fire, and like a blood stream clogged with bacteria, the local area network dies when it clogs with messages. Up to now, the computer staff has been able to mop that up as a local network problem. Till now, the offices were local, and contagion between separate offices was rare. So after a short period of immunity, that warning against opening e-mail attachments faded.
But with the global scope of the internet linking all the offices in the world, and with many people sending MS Word documents (with those self executing macros) across the internet, the internet has become a fertile avenue of infection for MS Word macro viruses and e-mail worms. Infection, and re-infection.
Happy 99 came to the USA from a major infection in Singapore.
DON'T OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS! EVER!
At Microsoft, any employee will tell you they live on internal e-mail for status information, work discussions, and results reports from the processes they have created. According to the news, MS had it so bad, they shut off all outgoing mail Friday, to keep from infecting the rest of the world. It is a replay of IBM's holliday worm of the 80's.
And like IBM's employees, they were told, DON'T OPEN ANY ATTACHMENTS! EVER!
Our economy is like an autonomic nervous system. It tries to maintain homeostasis on a global scale by organizing shipments and money flow. Back in the 1970's, with fax machines, credit card swipe machines, and grocery store scanners that drove in-store computers to automatically adjusted inventory orders, our telephone system was already handling more electronic message traffic between machines in grocery stores, banks, retail establishments and warehouses, than between humans. All of that was data, things programs used; not things like self executing macros.
Most of that economic neural message traffic has either already moved on to the internet, or is in the process of moving on to the internet. Like nerve ends with specific message neurotransmitters, this traffic can not easily be moved back onto the telephone system. Even if humans try to stand in, the sheer volume of traffic, and the magnitude of errors humans make in trying to understanding what the messages mean, and what each other is trying to say, is intolerable to our high speed "autonomic" economic nervous system. This isn't the 1960's any more.
We can't shut down the internet and clean our computers, because most of the people don't know HOW to do any of that. Even if you were to re-install Windows, the worms live in your documents, which you would have to remove all macros from. Aside from changing how your documents look, you might miss one or two documents. And become re-infected. And re-infect your office, and the world.
So the simple rule is, DO NOT open Attachments. EVER!
We have to compartmentalize some of the internet FAST! The Melissa and Happy99 worms will force that to happen. With that, things will improve. But for now, DO NOT open Attachments, EVER!
Windows is only about ten years old. It has lived in a highly responsible business environment, where no one wants to cause havoc, and any mistakes are punished. Till recently, most of those LANs ended at the walls of the building they were in. You could lose an office or two to a worm epidemic without creating a pandemic. Now, with the internet, the avenues of contagion are global.
UNIX will be thirty years old this fall. UNIX grew up in a harsher environment of universities where kiddies routinely try to commit acts of cyber vandalism as well as have far more inflammatory accidents both in formal research laboratories, and informal dorm experiments involving worms, viruses, and general attempts which, in retrospect border on mayhem.
UNIX has weathered these kinds of things before, and evolved to survive them, and stop them. Part of that is an immune system, but most of it is due to simple built-in compartmentalization, not unlike the blood brain barrier, that contains problems and keeps them from spreading. Windows hasn't been challenged very much, except in copy shops which, till recently, have been mostly Mac based anyway. So it has not evolved much of an immune system. You have to graft that on from McAffee or Norton Anti-Virus.
I use UNIX and LINUX systems because there is just no way that I could do this stuff on a Windows based environment without hiring five programmers and spending half a year to write this kind of stuff. With a world-wide development team, Linux is evolving faster than Windows or most Unix systems. It will survive. Do I think you should switch? If you like the point-and-click simplicity of Windows or the Mac; then probably not for a few years. But if you like to work in your home workshop, you might think about bringing up a copy on some old 486 machine you have sitting in the corner.
Remember, DO NOT EVER open ATTACHMENTS!
CERT alert, with diagnostic and prevention information, is at: http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-99-04-Melissa-Macro-Virus.html
Copyright (C) 1999, javilk@mall-net.com. Permission granted to forward as long as intact, and not altered. You might forward it to anyone whom you fear might open an Attachments... Just, don't mark it "Important message".
Update below!
javilk@mall-net.com ------------------ webmaster@Mall-Net.com ----------------------- IMAGINEERING -------------------------- ----------------- Every mouse click, a Vote ------------------- ---------- Do they vote For, or Against your pages? ----------- ----- What people want: http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/ ---- --------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: - Melissa author is caught From: George Matyjewicz Looks like the author of Melissa was caught. His name is David L. Smith, 30, from Trenton NJ and he faces a fine of up to $480,000 and a maximum of 40 years in jail. The charges: interruption of public communications, conspiracy and theft of computer service. He was released on $100,000 bail. Smith worked as a network programmer for a company that did subcontracting for At&T. He allegedly created the virus in his apartment, and spread it using a stolen AOL account. The virus was named for a topless dancer Smith once knew in Florida. They were able to track Smith to the telephone he used. Federal and state computer units were able to track him down in three days. George E-Tailer's Digest (Worth looking at)