Is ILoveYou more famous than Jesus?

Rob Rosenberger, Vmyths co-founder
Friday, 5 May 2000 NBC'S TOM BROKAW opened yesterday's newscast not with the death of John Cardinal O'Connor, but with the death of the Internet. Brokaw works in the same city as America's greatest Roman Catholic leader, yet the old geezer played second fiddle to a mediocre worm/virus. Amazing. The Internet died yesterday, by the way. Oh, the humanity! Let's all pause for a nano-minute of silence... {sniffle} I'll miss the web even more than the dead priest guy. (What was his name again? Right, O'Connor.)

First, tabulate the ILoveYou virus emails you received. Then tabulate the ILoveYou virus alerts you received... Did the same thing happen to you last year during the Melissa hysteria?

CNN.com focused so much journalism effort on the ILoveYou virus that they couldn't even offer the Catholic leader a correct title. (It's "John Cardinal O'Connor.") Makes you wonder if CNN.com ever demeaned "Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth." Yes, you heard me: a mediocre worm/virus. Peter Watkins (Network Associates) and other antivirus bigwigs agree with me on this point. True story. I checked my email in an airport Internet bar yesterday. Brokaw came on the air — and the bar turned into a movie set. Camera One focuses on my face: "Could you turn that up?" Camera Three focuses on the bartender as she operates the TV remote. Camera Two pans the patrons, who all fall silent as Brokaw describes the horrifying über-virus. Then the news shifts to some old guy in a casket. Camera One stays on me as I toss a bill on the counter, swig one last gulp of beer, and turn to leave. Man, I shoulda raised my pint to the patrons. "A toast to the Internet: we hardly knew ye..." Hear, hear.
OKAY, ENOUGH WHINING. Let's go over the stuff you need to think about. Caution: you'll upset many corporate virus experts and CIOs if you point these things out to them. First, ask yourself a simple question. Did the virus itself clog up your company's email system — or did hysterical virus alerts clog up your company's email system? If your company got whacked by the ILoveYou virus, don't ask why it happened so quickly. Ask why it happened at all! Didn't the experts learn about this problem last year when Melissa struck? If your company virus expert says "we learned enough to react in minutes instead of hours," then you should ask why your firm still responds to viruses after the fact. If someone blames Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting, ask why antivirus software didn't stop the virus at the email gateway. "The attachment name said '.txt.vbs', yet your recommended antivirus solution couldn't recognize such a simple (and well known) trick. What gives?" If your virus expert blames Microsoft's ubiquity for the virus, ask how much more common the world will grow when we standardize on Java or Linux or whatever else comes next. If he/she babbles about improved security in the next great operating system, ask "why did Java specification v1.1 downgrade its security model?" If someone recommends replacing Microsoft Outlook with another product, tell them "A virus must first reach a computer before it can ever hope to infect it. Email offers an excellent transmission method no matter what email product we use. Thus, we should try to stop viruses before they enter our email infrastructure." If your virus expert says the firm uses gateway antivirus software, say "it doesn't work very well, does it?" If a virus expert urges you to get daily antivirus updates, argue "first you told us to inject updates into our computers on a quarterly schedule. Then you told us to inject updates on a monthly schedule. A few years ago you started telling us to score a fix every week. Last year you told us to avoid Y2K viruses by injecting our computers on a daily basis. I swear, you sound like a pusher and I feel like a drug addict." If a virus expert says you need antivirus software to protect you from ILoveYou, say "if we'd turned off Windows Visual Basic Scripting last week, then our PCs wouldn't have gotten infected. This means our PCs could've protected us from ILoveYou before it even existed. We don't need to update our antivirus software — we need to update our antivirus experts!" I could go on for hours about all the stupid things pseudo-experts will recommend in the days to come. Things like precautionary disconnects. Time-delayed email scanning. Persistent antivirus updates (you'll need a persistent Internet connection). Redundant virus scanners. Crippled user interfaces. Obscure operating systems. Expensive replacements for the software you already own & use... Fearmongers will moan the obligatory "wake-up call" phrase. Every expert on the planet (myself included!) will try to get valuable free media exposure. Reporters will create instant experts out of thin air without even trying. Firms will issue press releases calling themselves the "first" to save the world from the evils of ILoveYou. ICSA already started the stats race with a press release containing estimates. ($1 billion, 30%, 70%, blah blah blah.) Editors will write countless witty headlines based on a catchy virus name. And for what? So we can continue to employ shallow thinkers in the computer security world? Bah. I honestly believe the media enjoys making funeral arrangements for the Internet. We've mourned its demise twice this year already! (Three times if you count the Y2K virus media fiasco.) Cardinal O'Connor only gets one funeral by comparison.