Happy Birthday Michelangelo (15 years old yesterday).

It seems like only yesterday the media was in a frenzy about the end of the world due to some computer virus or another, actually it was last week when some media organisations ran a story about the Rinbot worm. Rinbot is nothing special, like many worms these days it exploit a known vulnerability or two in order to propagate and generally go about it’s thing. It just so happens it uses a patched vulnerability in Symantec products as one of the three vulnerabilities it exploits. Symantec themselves only rate Rinbot as a low risk piece of malware, so what did it do to deserve this hype. Probably nothing, it seems Thursday and Friday where slow news days. But has anything really changed in the last 15 years, well actually not really. Back in March 1992 the media was in a frenzy again, this time about a 'super bug' called Michelangelo. The press at the time hyped this simple boot sector virus in to something like the end of the world. The virus was set to trigger on March 6th, the birth date of it’s name sake, at which point it would proceed to overwrite sections of the hard disk with nulls. The press and experts ran with the premise that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of machines had been infected with the virus. In reality the number probably was more like hundreds, and after the event reported losses as a result of the virus where limited. At the time it was claimed the virus could lay dormant for years, but as we all know now this was plainly not the case.

I have been feeling a little bit sick the last 5 days, recovering from the flu. Tomorrow I will be back in the office and possible try to see what will happen with the EICAR conference this year as it appears to me that the EICAR-conference was attacked by the flu as well and possibly will be cancelled this year. I will post more if I have more details about this bad situation.