China: Y2K Incidents & Virus Attack

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Received by email from Humanitarian Resource Institute mailto:y2knetwork@humanitarian.net

---Begin repost--- December 5, 1999

Contact: Stephen M. Apatow President, Humanitarian Resource Institute Eastern USA: (203) 668-0282 Western USA: (775) 884-4680 Internet: http://www.humanitarian.net Email: sma@humanitarian.net

YEAR 2000 TECHNOLOGY CHALLENGES REPORT http://www.humanitarian.net/challenges.html

South China Morning Post Thursday, January 6, 2000 http://www.scmp.com/News/HongKong/Article/FullText_asp_ArticleID-20000106022427102.asp

COMPANIES HIT WITH Y2K BUG AND VIRUS

ALEX LO

Excerpts:

More than a dozen companies and organizations have been hit by the Y2K bug and one other suffered the first known malicious virus attack activated by the year change, the Productivity Council said yesterday.

In the first serious attack by one of 14 viruses linked to the year 2000 rollover, the virus known as W32.Mypics.Worm, attacked a computer firm's system and destroyed its Bios input-output system.

"In layman's terms, the computer is as good as dead. It would be difficult to retrieve any data at this stage," said the council's information technology division general manager Yung Kai-tai.

Since Saturday, the council has recorded 13 Y2K incidents in addition to the virus attack.

Three were serious, with one system failure and two software programs that would not function properly.

The council yesterday sounded a warning about 14 viruses that could strike any time this year, some of which may be spread unwittingly by e-mail.

"Because of the nature of computer code-writing, designing a 2000-sensitive virus is much easier than a date-specific virus," the council's principal IT consultant, Roy Ko Wai-tak, said.

The council is expecting approval for a government grant to set up a computer emergency response centre modelled on similar organizations in 90 countries.

Pending approval, the centre could start operations by this summer, he said.

It would help local companies and organizations in computer emergencies liaise with similar overseas centres and promote Internet and computer security.

Information and counter-measures against the Y2K viruses are available at www.symantec.com/avcenter/Y2K ---End repost---

Note: the URL given does not appear to be correct. Use http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.mypics.worm.html. According to Symantec, this worm also attempts to format the hard drive.

-- Halim Dunsky (halim@y2kcommunity.org), January 06, 2000

Answers

This is one of the reasons I've been using Linux for reading e-mail. When logged on as a user, any executable that would try to write to hardware in any area other than the current user directory is stopped cold. It can't format the drive because I'm not logged on as a sysadmin when I get e-mails, so it doesn't have the required permissions.

Geez, and MS wonders why businesses are giving Linux and Unix so much consideration these days. Duh . . . .

-- Sam Walker (swalker2000@earthlink.net), January 06, 2000.


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