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(Mis)Uses of Technology

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Mar 23rd 2005 5:34pm





The $100,000 Screensaver

from the a-bargain-at-half-the-price dept

Here's one for the IT folks reading the site who can't stand people installing stuff on their own and making life difficult for others. It's the story of a law firm where a few people at the firm got some spam about some "great new screensavers" which they decided to install... which unleashed some sort of malicious file that eventually meant the entire network was shut down, and each PC had to be cleaned up individually, for a total cost of somewhere around $100,000. Who are these people who aren't skeptical of spam?

5 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    IT Dept should be fired

    identicon
    VonSkippy, Mar 23rd, 2005 @ 10:26pm

    They're called Group Policies, and it would have saved the company $100K if their IT Staff had heard of them.
    What moron's, then to top off their stupidity, they have to outsource the clean up.
    //file in the ever growing "some people should not be allowed to use computers" file//

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: more on morons

    identicon
    Got punctuation?, Mar 23rd, 2005 @ 10:39pm

    No apostrophe, please, in morons (not moron's). Also, semicolons can be quite useful.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  

    Re: more on morons

    identicon
    Tim, Mar 24th, 2005 @ 2:17am

    Don't forget the hyphen (`ever-growing') as well!

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  4.  

    No Subject Given

    identicon
    slim999, Mar 24th, 2005 @ 8:35am

    The bigger issue here is that the law firm clearly had either no system administrator, or a maroon for one.

    (Yes, I know it's misspelled ... if you don't get the reference, well then you spent too little time watching cartoons as a kid.)

    It's quite common for smallish firms to work this way, where they have some outsourced IT business come in every few months to update and upgrade things.

    You get what you pay for. As you lawyers like to say: "Caveat Emptor."

    I'll not get into the obvious solution here, which is to first kill all the lawyers. (Hat Tip: William Shakespeare.)

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  5.  

    Lawyers get Violated

    identicon
    knight37, Mar 24th, 2005 @ 11:15am

    So a bunch of lawyers got infected with viruses? Poetic justice is a beautiful thing.

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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