Dear Pamela:
I hear about viruses everyday from my friends and colleagues, and often on
the news. I read about them on the Internet or in the newspaper. But I
never took them seriously until I was hit by the pretty park that came to
me the other day via the seafood list server.
For some reason, thus far I was so lucky not to be hit by a virus. I always
thought that this is something that happens to others. And that's why I
never even bothered to renew my subscription to the online McAfee virus
scanner. However, the price that I had to pay for my negligence was
enormous. As my first instinct, I was little surprised why Fernando sent
me an attachment with a cartoon-faced icon. It was quite luring to junk
straight to the trash. So (oh no!) I double clicked on it. At that
instant, nothing happened except for a little murmur in the drive. That's
when a cold wave ran through my body and I got frantic. VIRUS!!!!! Could
it be a virus? I scanned my C: drive with a version of McAfee software and
sure enough, it detected two infected files: FILES32.VXD and WSOCK32.DLL.
Since these were system files, I thought that I can always reload them
from another computer. Therefore, I went ahead and deleted them not
realizing that in order to kill one worm, I was opening a whole new
can-of-worms. After this deletion, no matter where I loaded these files
from, I could not establish any interaction with my main server. My e-mail
software (Outlook) and browsers started acting crazy. I cut myself off
completely from the outside world. I reloaded my browsers and Outlook
software but that didn't help any. So I went ahead and reloaded the entire
operating system again. Bad, bad move! That didn't help one bit instead it
changed a bunch of my driver settings. The day came to end fast and soon it
was 7 pm. I didn't want to leave my computer infected with virus because
of the fear that it might incubate and replicate itself if left untreated
and that in the morning the computer may explode ...kidding of course.
Actually I was expecting some important mail and was quite frustrated by
this time. So I asked our "high dollar" computer consultant to come-in and
salvage me out of this mess. Dave and I spent about three hours fixing the
damage that virus and I had collectively caused to the computer.
Fortunately I didn't loose any critical data....just some sleep.
I fall among the group of productive scientists, who believe in spending
their extra time in solving the "problems of the world" over coffee than
spending it on backing-up the data. I guess I learned my lesson.
There is not particular reason why I am writing all this to you...except
may be to vent out a little bit ....and to share my experience with my
fellow scientists who are there to solve the "problems of the world". But
I do have a question for you: Isn't there some way you can put a virus
check routine on the server that can scan each incoming mail before
transferring it to the seafood list?
I appreciate the great service that your organization is providing in
maintaining this seafood listserve.
Respectfully,
Dr. Neeraj Khanna
R&D, Bio-Cide International
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 09 2000 - 11:11:17 PST