Quoting Peter Aherne <peter at linux.ie>:
> 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.
Because since SCO are big in the news at the moment some little virus writter
has targeted them to get larger publicity, and also it obscures the fact that
the worm puts a backdoor connection onto your PC which would allow a hacker to
connect to your machine and take it over. So any sensitive material would be
available to them.
> 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.
Again this is just some virus writter using SCO to get publicity. Has nothing
to do with openoffice.org and unusually enough little to do with Microsoft. The
reason companies like Microsoft and SCO get targeted is because their in the
News frequently (SCO over the last 18 months) and therefore attacks on them are
much more likely to get large publicity versus similiar attacks that have been
made on smaller groups.
> 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
Duh! Don't open attachments unless you requested a file to be sent by the
person that the mail comes from. Firewalls are also good, and very simple to
enable in XP. The spread of the worm relies totally on social engineering, i.e.
it requires users to open the attachment. Updating Office doesn't really help,
not opening attachments does.
>> RTE: Very good...etc.
obviously not a clue about what the worm is about.
>> --
> Peter Aherne, Software Engineer, Motorola Ireland Ltd.
>http://www.skynet.ie/~peter - peter at linux.ie> Ph: +353 21 4511234 Mobile: +353 87 2246834
>> --
> Irish Linux Users' Group
>http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/>
--
Darragh
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