CIH computer virus toll tops 540,000

Will this affect Y2K remediation?

-- Y2K is serious (concerned@citizen.com), April 29, 1999

Answers

Wait a minute; I thought it was 1,000,000 computers ... so it's already dropped by half in just a coupla days?

Sysman, are you listening? :)

Besides, like I told him: this will just prove my point. Lots of computers got hammered at the same time, and in a few months, it'll be a distant memory. They'll work around it. Bet me. :)

-- Stephen M. Poole, CET (smpoole7@bellsouth.net), April 29, 1999.

This might be an excellent test of the domino theory, except the results are rigged. If it causes systemic problems, we told you so. If it doesn't, then it doesn't count.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), April 29, 1999.

As this c.s.y2k post indicates, virus attacks and Y2K are apples and oranges. However, this episode should shatter some of the complacency in the asian countries, as they are just now waking up to the fact that their unremediated economies are soon to be toast. And when that burnt smell fills the air, we in the US will be doing some waking up ourselves.

On 28 Apr 1999 10:43:27 GMT, kiyoinc@ibm.XOUT.net (cory hamasaki)
wrote:



>This is an interesting development for several reasons.  Contrary to 
>popular belief, in the U.S. and the 1st world, S/390 mainframes
>still contain most of the critical data.  
>
>The fact that a department level big thinker runs a weekly extract 
and 
>Excel's the data into graphs and powerpoint slides has little to do 
with 
>enterprise scale mission critical processing.
>
>It seems that this virus is a pretty bad one.  We can learn from 
this. 
>How long is the outage?  Who's affected?  Will any smallish firms 
fail as
>a consequence?  Whatever the analysis, a PeeCeeWeeNee's virus is 
nothing 
>like the scale of problem of a non-recoverable S/390 application 
failure.
>
>Enterprise systems failures persist.  You don't install a "quick-fix" 
and
>get back on your feet in, oh, 3 or 6 hours.  If you haven't seen one 
of 
>these events, where the CEO is screaming as if his foot is in a 
>bear-trap, you have no idea of what awaits.



In addition, these PC virus problems are relatively easy to fix.  You
just have to reformat the HD and reload the OS and the (pirated?)
applications.  Data is not usually a major problem in large
organizations because it is probably available from a mainframe, with
proper backup and recovery procedures in place.  Smaller mom and pop
businesses can probably recover their data manually (if they don't
already have a backup).



Y2K will be different, even for PC's, because the software will simply
stop working.  Reloading it, or the data, will have absolutely no
effect on recovery.  It will take a great deal of time to distribute
and install corrected copies of the software, just as it took over a
year to upgrade the POS credit card terminals when they failed in
1997.  For some, it will take so much time that recovery is not
possible.



And, as you correctly point out, most of the real mission critical
work is still done on mainframes.  Now if you and Shmuel and I got
together I'm sure we could come up with a mainframe virus which would
really do a number!  Nah.  Why bother.  Y2K will do that anyway.



=====================================
y 2 0 0 0 @ i n f o m a g i c . c o m
=====================================

-- a (a@a.a), April 29, 1999.

Virus = easy: no outside disks, no downloading, no emails that say "FWD", and no emails from anyone you don't know - just say "delete".

Y2K = ?

I don't see much in common between the 2.

-- Steve Hartzler (s.hartzler@usa.net), April 30, 1999.

Stephen,

Yes, I'm listening. The way I read the article, the 540,000 is in South Korea and Turkey alone. And once again, here's a snip, same as I read in another article:

"The Republic of Korea was hit equally as hard -- with anywhere from a government-admitted 240,000 computers hit to the industry's estimate of 600,000."

Time will tell the real numbers. <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 30, 1999.

Happens ol' IFM is still batting a big ZERO. On a machine with a FLASH BIOS, CIH will write garbage to the BIOS, thus rendering the motherboard unusable without chip replacement.

You know, if I shot off my mouth like InFoMagic, and was dead wrong as much as he is (all the time as far as I can tell) you guys would laugh me out of court every time I posted something. Set your mental filters from 'DELETE POSITIVE Y2K NEWS' to 'DELETE Y2K GARBAGE POSTINGS' and some real information might start to come through.

-- Paul Davis (davisp1953@yahoo.com), April 30, 1999.

Paul Davis: Infomagic was talking about ease of recovering software after a virus, not replacing burned out motherboards or disk drives. Apparently you have never dealt with a serious software corruption problem and don't understand the significance.

Interesting though that you are more of a doomer than Info on this point.

-- a (a@a.a), April 30, 1999.