I thought you might be interested in trying this and then see your hair stand out. When I tried it just now (Wednesday Feb 27, 11am) it still worked. It's real too, yikes. This web page opens up a DOS box on your computer. Someone really interested in destruction would be able to wreak havoc on everyone visiting them. Or, cracked sites might be equipped with this doozy on their home page and all their visitors just beheaded. I'm not sure how you could protect your users against this kind of attack. Suggestions anyone? http://www.w2knews.com/rd/rd.cfm?id=020228TB-Scary&mid=1054412928507714

[ 28 February 2002: Message edited by: kdyer ]

It isn't the first time we see this kind of virus distributions. Sometimes
it is hard to catch such virus when the creator has encrypted his pages.

Our advise is:
keep your virus definitions up-to-date and also the file extensions the
scanner will looking for (running your scanner on all files can decrease
the performance of clients dramatically).
in extreme situations you can install also another scanner on your client.

Also the latest virus software contains new capabilities
f.e.
- verify all in- and outgoing mail,
- verify all downloads,
- verify iexplorer pages
(new facility of latest Norton Antivirus 2002 Professional edition which is an
upgrade of earlier 2002 edition),
- automatically download new definition and configuration files.
greetings.

btw: of course patches are important. mostly isn't a big problem for big
organizations because security is a part of company policy. (very) small
organizations must trust the quality of their virus scanner, which will/must
be always up-to-date.

Norton Corporate Edition I just updated tonight was quiet

Firewall was quiet too ????

Killed word.exe and all was ok

Obviously, this is a non-destructive use of this "functionality" but it would seem to me that there would be some "fail-safe" like when you click on a link for a VBS, BAT, EXE, etc. that is prompts you to start a download or install.

The reason for bringing this up is that we need to be extra vigilant in our work to be sure that we keep the user community safe. It just seems that software companies like Microsoft have not caught this is very scary.

Thanks!

- Kent

code:

---

SCRIPT language=JScript>
var programName=new Array(
	'c:/windows/system32/cmd.exe',
	'c:/winnt/system32/cmd.exe',
	'c:/cmd.exe'
);
function Init(){
	var oPopup=window.createPopup();
	var oPopBody=oPopup.document.body;
	var n,html='';
	for(n=0;n		html+="";
	oPopBody.innerHTML=html;
	oPopup.show(290, 190, 200, 200, document.body);
}

---