Don’t Panic: Tales from the Virus Frontier

At my first computer job out of college, Fair, Isaac and Company, we had an office full of networked Macs. A friend of mine gave me a floppy with some free Mac antivirus tools, so I showed this to a group of coworkers.

Seemed pretty useful, I thought.

Forget it. “We don’t need all that,” my boss told me. “We’re never going to get a virus in here.”

Haha. Guess what happened next.

One of our employees by the name of Marge brought in a floppy full of really neat games, so everyone was madly passing it around, copying it, and loading games on their machines.

Unfortunately, it was also crawling with viruses. I remember one of them would cause the machine to speak in a digitized voice: “Don’t panic.”

Panic we did. Marge acquired the nickname “Typhoid Marge,” and after a quickly organized team of us IT folk stormed the building with our antivirus efforts, all was well.

We called ourselves the “Mac S.W.A.T. Team”—we even had tshirts made up.

Wait, did I say all was well? Yeah, no. Everyone just pulled out a copy of Marge’s disk from hiding and installed everything anew. It took us some time to root all of that out.

My boss came to me and confessed, quite contritely, “I was wrong.”

At West Publishing, my second computer job, we had an entire antivirus division. Anyone bringing in a floppy disk from outside the company had to drop it off at the antivirus department to have it scanned, after which you could use it.

One day I spotted a huge sign as I entered the door warning us not to read our email, in Armageddon type. There was a virus outbreak coming in through email.

I just snorted. Email was text. Completely harmless. How could that be?

It could. The email had an attachment that was a disguised .vbs file. And people were foolishly clicking on it.

It was the dreaded ILOVEYOU virus, purporting to be a love letter from an admirer, and curious (or hopeful?) people were falling for it left and right.

They had even shut off all connection of the company to the internet, yet it was still propagating like wildfire due to people interacting with emails that had previously arrived.

A .vbs file was no danger to me, since I had long ago configured my computer to open such files with boring, harmless notepad.exe instead of executing them as VBScript programs. But nobody else had thought of that.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t taking chances. I didn’t interact with my emails at all that day, nor did I get much work done, but I had great fun laughing hysterically and announcing to everyone as the emails came in, “Coleen from Accounting loves me! Craig from Sales loves me!”

At my third job, MHC Software, we had a web server hosting our corporate marketing website inside a locked room. Unfortunately, various people without internet access, but who possessed the proper key, were in the habit of sneaking in there to “view sports scores,” or so they said.

Of course, when you’re browsing the web, it’s possible you might pick up a virus or two.

And so that led to our IT guy asking me, “Why is our web server sending thousands of emails a minute to people all over the world?”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Oh, no.

Oh, yes. We were owned. Cooked, as the young’uns would say today.

We actually had to wipe that server machine and start over. Ooh, my boss was livid.

After that incident we moved our web server to a hosting company with premises in a repurposed bank building. They boasted that their machines were safe from such shenanigans, you see… because they were housed in the bank vault.

Their promotional literature had photos: see those equipment racks? In a room behind an immense circular metal vault door? Which was propped open with a couch?

Of course, this totally misses the point: that vault door could be sealed like Fort Knox, but those machines would still be on the internet; any meaningful threat would come from the network, not the room.

I laughed and laughed. Fun times, fun times.