LoveLetter ruins my day

Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar

I hate viruses. So. I stumble in to work Thursday. I make the mistake of checking my mail before I’ve had my coffee. Mail from a VIP. “Please kindly check this …” I read no further. I spy an attachment, so I do exactly–in my mind–what it asks. I open the attachment in Notepad and look at it. Hmm. A VBscript program written by someone who doesn’t like school. Hmm. Wait, why’s this thing messing with the registry? Why’s this thing making copies of some files and deleting others? Crap! This is a virus! Who else did she send this to? Meanwhile a neighbor’s jabbering away at me about something or another. “Shuddup!” I tell him as I print it out. I print the code (4 pages I think), grab it, circle a couple of offending lines of code, then rush upstairs. Yep, you’ve got it. We were infected with the now-notorious “Iloveyou” virus.
Yeah, loser. I love you too, but only because Jesus says I have to love my enemies. So, God bless you, whoever you are. You’re gonna need that and more. Bad.

I located two infected computers, then I called the wisest, coolest head in the organization (our Unix ubermeister) for advice on how to proceed. This was a good 2-3 hours before Symantec had a fix posted on its Web site. He said he and one of our ace programmers had dissected the code and determined all of the changes it makes. He had registry entries to fix and files to look for. Armed with that info, I was able to put out the fire pretty quickly (silently reminding myself that using Netscape and Eudora instead of Internet Exploiter and Outlook sometimes really has its advantages), but it turned into a very draining day.

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