[ILUG] Morning Ireland piece on MyDoom virus

[Peter Aherne]

On Mon, 02 Feb 2004, Gavin McCullagh said the following:
> On Mon, 02 Feb 2004, Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) wrote:
> 
> > http://www.rte.ie/news/2004/0202/morningireland/morningireland5a.smil
> > 
> > Is the link ... anyone got the time to transcribe ?
> 
> I'll do it over lunch, if that's early enough.  If someone else is working
> on it let mw know and I won't bother.
> 

Here is a partial transcript, I skipped the intro about what a worm is
etc...I paticularly like his explanation of why SCO was targetted...

RTE: Why is this happening?

BUA: This goes back to what is called the browser wars, whereby
Microsoft effectively put Netscape out of business by giving away a
competitive product for free, using all their money to do that. They did
much the same with apple although apple has not gone out of business and
the people who are behind this virus, I would suspect, are people who
are promoting a thing called open system software where by you can have
competitors for the Microsoft products which are essentially free.

RTE: Would the attackers then almost by definition be competitors?

BUA: No because these competitors don.t really exist as a company
although there are some companies such as openoffice.org and star office
and Linux but Microsoft has essentially put all the commercial
competition out of business or have bought them up or whatever. Open
source software is developed by volunteers and anyone can go into a
website and have a look at how the program is developing and throw in a
suggestion and say you should include my little suggestion.

RTE: The experts say there are going to move on Microsoft tomorrow. Is
this worm an expression of hatred of Microsoft?

BUA: Absolutely, that's exactly what it is. And also the reason this SCO
company was targeted was because if you go to a website such as
openoffice.org you can download a free copy of what is a competitor of
Microsoft office an equivalent of MS word and an equivalent of MS excel,
Which probably most of you listeners have on their computers.

RTE: Is there any protection against this?

BUA: Yes, two things you can do. No1 is you have windows and you have
Microsoft office get the updated versions by connecting to the internet
and go into the Microsoft website and downloading it. but if you have,
that wont protect you if you have the virus already and if you do the
thing to do is first of all, do no harm, so unplug your computer from
the internet, plug it out of the network if you are connected to a
network. And then use a different computer maybe go to a web cafe to go
to softice.com which is an anti-virus company and you can download onto
the floppy disk there a free cleaning utility which will clean up your
computer

RTE: Very good...etc.

-- 
Peter Aherne, Software Engineer, Motorola Ireland Ltd.
http://www.skynet.ie/~peter - peter at linux.ie
Ph: +353 21 4511234 Mobile: +353 87 2246834