adamg@world.std.com (Adam M Gaffin) (02/07/91)
Hi, all! I'm a reporter at the Middlesex News in Framingham, Mass. The new governor here had some trouble getting his budget to the Legislature this week, allegedly because of a virus, and I'd be most grateful if somebody could help me out with a story. Seems one of his aides was up late finishing the budget on his Mac II (as in 3 a.m.) for delivery to the Legislature that morning. He had just typed about 50 (!) pages of the document in MacWrite, when it refused to save the document. He eventually was able to retrieve an early version of the document, which he had filed under a different name, but those 50 pages were gone. When he ran Interferon 3.1 he got this messages: "Virus Type 003 on the TOPS network." The computer had been part of LAN in the Office of Administration and Finance but was taken off and moved to his office so he could work on the document (the governor's office actually uses an old Wang system, but since the guy was new and time was short, he figured he'd work with what he already knew). The office is now busy checking all the other computers, of course, and the aide in question has been told to save his documents more often! So, does anybody know what kind of virus this might be and how common it is? And is it true that Mac viruses are easier to write than PC ones (one of our PC people told me that; maybe she's biased :-) ). And, in the Dumb Question of the Week category: how might the virus have gotten into the network in the first place? I assume it would be somebody bringing an infected disk in from home (the LAN is not tied to any other network), but might there be other ways (short of the Dukakoids sabotaging the system, which I doubt, given they had no idea it was going to be used to write the budget, since they did all that on their Wangs). Any help would be most appreciated! Thanks! Adam Gaffin Middlesex News, Framingham, MA adamg@world.std.com Voice: (508) 626-3968 Fred the Middlesex News Computer: (508) 872-8461
gsb1@forth.stirling.ac.uk (Mr Gordon S Byron) (03/06/91)
>It's not a question of Bias, the mac system is very powerful, but part >of that power comes from openness. Openness leaves one vulnerable. >(I am generally biased against macs, with the exception of their >usefullness for desktop publishing) Don't you find DOS a much easier environment to hack than a Mac? Getting into the Mac toolbox is a much more daunting prospect than hacking DOS. The Mac openness exists in terms of the user front-end. The operating system is however far from "open". This in fact is one of the reasons Mac-bashers give for not liking the Mac. You can customise your Mac more delightfully with start-up screens alterations to details in the interface but it is by no means a foregone conclusion that it is easier to write a virus for the Mac# ******************************************************************************* Snailmail: Gordon Byron, Arts Computing Advisor,Pathfoot Building, University of Stirling,FK9 4LA Stirling, Scotland, UK. Voice: 0786 73171: Ext 7266 Fax: +78651335 *******************************************************************************