When Worms Get Serious

Sep 1, 2003 12:00 PM, By PAUL ROTHMAN

After a long day at work looking at a computer, sometimes I like to play computer games on the Internet when I get home. The other day I fired up my home computer — chips and soda at the ready — and headed over to my favorite gaming site, psyched up for a rousing backgammon tournament.

But wait! A message flashes onto the screen, telling me in “computer-ese” that the system is shutting down because of a problem with the RPC. Sounds like a complicated birth control device. I dismissed it as a minor glitch, re-booted and tried to re-psyche myself for the backgammon. Little did I know RPC meant “Remote Procedure Call,” or in layman's terms, “Readily Plaguing your Computer.”

Turns out Bill Gates forgot to plug a security hole (the RPC) on my Windows XP, and some genius hacker took advantage of it to drop a nasty little virus called “Blaster” onto my machine. Gee, thanks pal.

My rousing backgammon tournament had to start without me, and I couldn't get my computer back up and running for a couple of days.

I figure there are two things we can all learn from this story (and millions of people around the world at that moment learned it together).

First: Hackers are idiots. They crave the attention that Mommy and Daddy never gave them as children. They want to get back at the world because they were geeks in high school.

The second thing is something I learned at work. According to a recent Edelman Cyber-security Survey, 43 percent of Americans say they feel “less secure” on their home computers versus 17 percent who say they feel less protected from viruses and hackers at work.

That's because in the corporate security department (the good ones), virus definitions are kept up to date, firewalls are in place, patches have been installed, and someone is usually watching to make sure everything is OK.

Meanwhile, as a casual Internet surfer at my house, there isn't a firewall's chance in the North Pole that I have quality security measures in place and up to date.

I realized as I was driving to the store to buy a new virus detector that the lesson is to take a hint from the IT security department at work. Time to lock the cyber-doors.

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This month in Access Control

• Targeting The Customer
• Electronic Pedigrees
• One Hero Among Many
• Who? What? When? Where? Why?
• More from September's issue