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IT SPECIALIST
Seth is a 27 year old IT Specialist for a 180 person
training company in Indianapolis with about 100
employees at HQ. |
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Upwards of 10 billion dollars is the estimated
cost of the “Love Bug” virus that struck the
entire world in May of 2000. Viruses, hackers, organized
cyber-terrorism, and clandestine internal threats are
all top issues in network security today. The information
technology (IT) industry drives productivity in business
and vice versa, but if not properly policed, it can all
come to a crashing halt. This costs time, money, and confidence.
Seth is a 27 year old IT Specialist for a 180 person training
company. They are headquartered in Indianapolis with about
100 employees at HQ and the rest are trainers in the field.
The IT department is just 4 people, but everything runs
pretty smoothly. Seth always loved computers growing up
and got an IT degree in school, but didn’t like
programming enough to code full time. This job was great
for him because it involved the best of several different
technology worlds.
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Worm Stampede
On this particular Wednesday, Emily in accounting
got back from lunch and opened a mail from a trainer
in Denver and then the attachment "relatedINFO.exe."
That's when all the real trouble started!
Immediately Emily's desktop wall paper changed to
a beach scene with a palm tree and her computer
secretly sent an infected e-mail to everyone in
her address list. This all happened in a matter
of seconds and at the same time Emily got a fake
alert message to restart her computer. She did.
Big mistake! It didn't come back on.
Seth was at his desk when the infected mail arrived,
but didn't notice it immediately. Of course, Emily
called him because her computer didn't restart properly.
Seth looked down at his inbox, realized what was
happening and flew into action!
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Don't
Touch IT!
Seth made an announcement over the intercom that
everyone should take their hands OFF their computers
and listen closely. Everyone who had mail open should
immediately delete the dangerous items and close
out of e-mail.
The rest of the IT team was away at a conference
on the other side of town so he called his boss
on his mobile and had all of them come back to the
office. Seth didn't know exactly what this threat
was, but he knew he had to protect the servers and
everyone's PC if he could. He ran to the server
room, punched in his security code, and checked
to make sure the machines were all still running
normally.
Back at his desk Seth ran a set of diagnostics on
the servers remotely and everything seemed to be
humming along. Whatever had infected them was dormant
at least for the moment. It wasn't creating junk
files or erasing hard disks. He stopped all outgoing
mail to the trainers in the field and pulled a phone
list out of the employee database and ran that over
to HR. They had to call everyone outside of HQ and
tell them they shouldn't log in or open e-mail until
they heard it was safe.
Next, Seth went to the website of their virus software
provider and found a warning on the home page about
the "Beach Worm." It was a brand new nasty one out
of Asia that worked a lot like the "Love Bug" from
a couple of years ago. A protection profile would
be available in 2 to 3 hours for auto-download.
Fortunately this worm didn't destroy data, but including
the time to manually reconfigure many of the local
desktop and remote laptop PCs it took them about
5 days to get back to normal productivity and cost
the company over $20,000. If Seth hadn't acted so
quickly it easily could have been 5 times worse!
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