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Melissa Virus Suspect Confesses

Posted by Roblimo on from the all-this-to-impress-a-topless-dancer dept.

rcade writes "Melissa virus suspect David L. Smith 'admitted to investigators that he created it and then destroyed the personal computers he used to post it on the Internet,' according to court papers turned up by the Asbury Park [NJ] Press."

6 of 133 comments (clear)

  1. Please... Grow up. by Inoshiro · · Score: 3

    Big Businesses seem to love sueing people when they have problems they can't explain.

    "But these Microsoft marketting people told me NT was good, so I told my IS and IT managers to use it.. Now this! We mu sue!!!"

    Disgusting!

    1) I never noticed any slowing of the internet as a whole (whereas the sendmail worm of the 80s affected actual network speeds all over the Darpa-net).

    2) Postfix MTA didn't receive one mail with a doc attachment. It if had, it would have at least done something sensible like message me whens everal thousand outgoing emails started happening.

    3) Clueless IS people who don't notice the network bandwidth is being eaten by hundreds of thousands of SMTP trasnfers should be fired.

    4) Netscape Communicator mail, PINE, and Eudora all have no problems with this (I use them, millions of others do).

    The problem only affected a fraction of the "true" internet population, because not many people use Outlook 9[78] ... And of those, the people who were not trained about their business machines were already a liability to their business (re: the stupids earlier on Slashdot).

    I hope Businesses grow up about responsibility, perhaps by demanind service contract, or perhaps by listening to their technical staff.

    --
    --
    Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
  2. Yes, there are other parties involved by Brian+Knotts · · Score: 3
    In his brief, Bubb suggested that Smith may not be the only defendant ultimately prosecuted in the "Melissa" case, saying that the investigation is centering on figuring out the amount of harm inflicted by the virus and determining if anyone else was involved.

    Other involved parties:

    • Microsoft
    • People (namely IS managers) clueless enough to use Microsoft software
    • People who habitutally send files through email, instead of using FTP

    --
    Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
  3. When is this going to stop? by GeneralTao · · Score: 5
    Here's what I don't understand. If your car stereo gets stolen, and there are no signs of forced entry, you can forget about the insurance company paying you one red cent for damages. This is because if you were dumb enough to leave your car unlocked, the insurance company sure as hell isn't gonna pay you money.

    If your whole car is stolen and you can't produce the keys, they aren't gonna buy you a new car. You shouldn't have left your keys in the ignition.


    The macro vulnerabilities have been around for EVER. Why, then, are companies allowed to continue whining when they are exploited? Why isn't there more pressure to plug this up? How many times can you listen to a guy moan about his car stereo before you yell "LOCK YER FRIGGIN DOORS, MORON!"

    Further consider.. what kind of crap would a car company get if they shipped a car with doors that just plain don't lock?

    I dunno. It just seems like software companies can get away with persistent bugs than never go away while the rest of the world is expected to provide a GOOD product.

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    --- Tao
  4. On a related note: by bgdarnel · · Score: 3

    Mozillazine (www.mozillazine.org) has this article today:

    Yet another hole has been found in Internet Explorer's ActiveX
    implementation. This one allows arbitrary code to be written to the user's
    hard-drive. The bug was found by Georgi Guninski, who has found many
    security bugs in IE and Communicator. To read more about it, click here to
    visit Georgi's page. If you click "Test it" beside the name of this bug
    ("Executing programs with IE 5.0") while using IE, the page you visit will
    write a small bit of sample code to your StartUp menu. You've been warned.
    Georgi calls this bug "the most significant of my discoveries and the most
    dangerous also".

  5. No damage done by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3

    I have yet to hear of one sys admin having a system actually go down because of this virus. Every system that I have heard go down was due to the sys admin hearing about this virus and then pulling the plug. Does preventative maintenance count as damage? I admit if Symantec and others didn't have an update 3 days after the release of this virus it may have caused some damage. But really this virus sent a little word doc around the world a few million times. There are more problematic e-mails than this: SPAM, Dancing babies etc. Also, has anyone ever read the source for this virus? Its crap, and obviously written either by more than one person or copied right out of a book and then edited a little. Someone with NO VB skills could easily create this hack with a few Microsoft Library MAPI articles. Give this guy a break. He had no idea what he was doing/creating. Someone left a gun unlocked for a child to play with. Do persecute the child. Two cents

  6. Was there really any _damage_? by Skinka · · Score: 3

    - "So Mr. xxxx of management, how much damage did Melissa inflict?"
    - "We estimate that Melissa cost us about 100 000 000 USD"
    - "A hundred million? How?"
    - "Um..well, we recieved a lot of bogus e-mail."
    - "$100 000 000 for that?"
    - "erm..uh.. Oh yeah, our mail server crashed twice so we had to reboot it a couple of times. That's pretty expensive, you know."