Last Updated on September 30, 2010 by Dave Farquhar
I left for Promise Keepers as planned late Friday morning, but not before I had a hectic morning with Nimda. Nimda didn’t spread too far (it seems most people got it from visiting Web sites, and in a lot of cases it was just pieces of it sitting dormant in browser caches), but we had no way of knowing that until we visited virtually every PC on the network. That takes a while–especially when you find people with anti-virus software that came free with a PC they bought in 1995 or 1996 whose definitions were last updated when Ace of Base was popular.
So we have a good argument in favor of kicking Norton AntiVirus into managed mode. And with the large number of unpatched copies of Internet Explorer out there, we’ve got an argument in favor of some kind of site management software so we can push installs.
The choice is pretty simple: Fork out the bucks for site management, or pay me enough overtime to make a downpayment on a house. It’s pretty obvious which decision makes sense.
As for PK, I learned a ton, and the bus ride to and from KC was fun. My buddies and I scored the very back seats. A couple of guys brought their early teenage sons, but for the most part, we were the young rowdies on our bus. (The kids in senior high were on the other bus.) I’ll talk about that later, when I have time to do it justice.
I worked 11 hours today, so I’m tired. I think it’s time for some quality time with my pillow.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Dave,
Agree on banning Windows for web and email servers. Leave the deskop for now. Then let the next wave of windows desktop viruses (and there will be) drive Windows from the corporate desktop.
One of problems in our organisation (50,000+ wordwide) were nitwits who have IIS servers running on their desktop computers.
Either they didnt know it was running?? or they were using it to publish a small groups web site. Of course they had never been patched since Adam was a boy!
"give a man a fish and he will eat today, give an idiot a rope and he will hang himself"
Anonymous.
Tim
Oh. Duh. There’s the other solution too, which appeals to the extremist in me. Ban Windows and Mac OS entirely and run some flavor of Unix on the desktop. Unix viruses are rarer than honest politicians, and Unix is easy to lock down so users won’t mess with it.
Only a fool runs IIS. That’s established. Especially now that you can even get an ASP module for Apache, so you can migrate your IIS stuff over to a real operating system like Linux, BSD, or OS/2.
But I’m liking Windows less and less on the desktop. NT/2000/XP doesn’t allow a regular user to do as much as the Mac does, change-wise, but it still allows far, far too much.
Dave, hope that you came away from Promise Keepers with some spirtual meat to chew on and savor in your soul.
Nimda hasn’t hit me, because I only download e-mail attachments if I know exactly who it’s from and I pay attention to the title of the attachment that I’m opening.
If those percausions aren’t enough, please make "All I Know About Nimda" the subject of a future article (more of a joke than a suggestion; but, if the title works…)