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Love is – Security
Added: (Wed Feb 04 2004)
Love is – Security
This is the season of Valentine, of love and romance. Of course 2004 is a leap year, so ladies are traditionally able to propose to their beloved on February 29th. Not too emancipated, only one day every four years!
Talking about love and romance, a few years ago Disney produced a series of wonderful films about a VW Beetle called Herbie, who beat all the other more expensive cars against all the odds in off-beat car races. It was called The Lovebug. Good old Herbie, he never gave up. And everyone always lived happily ever after. (Except for the baddies, that is.)
Currently there is a song out called ‘Who’s the Daddy?’ by rap artist and DJ Lovebug Starski. Seems to be quite popular as a polyphonic ringtone at the moment. Another lovebug is the title of a song by Country & Western singer George Strait (bet he remembers Herbie too). Of course, if you’re American, a lovebug is the word used for a ladybird.
However, whatever nationality you are, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of the Lovebug virus. Yes, that’s the one that sent everyone running for cover at the turn of the century. Just about every news story for a couple of months ran an item on this one. It came in various forms including love-letter-for-you, lovebug and iloveyou. It started out from Manila, in the Philippines. It sent itself out via your Microsoft Outlook address book and spread to internet chat rooms. Loveletter also tried to download a password cracking program from a website. Nasty. Nothing very loving in that.
So why was the lovebug virus so successful? Maybe it’s because we all loved getting e-mails so much that we opened every one without a second thought. Or perhaps we didn’t have an e-mail filter set up. Or we had no firewall to prevent website downloads. Of maybe we just needed a wake-up call to the reality of virus attacks. Not everyone who sends e-mails does so with the best intentions.
With the new anti-spam laws now out, this sort of thing should happen less. But hackers and virus writers don’t always do this sort of thing to be deliberately damaging; they just do it because they can, and because companies and individuals haven’t had mechanisms in place to stop them. Could such a virus be as effective now that we are more information security aware? The only way to truly combat this possibility is to keep your anti-virus software up to date, download the latest patches, and make sure everyone in your organisation knows what the security policy is. Perhaps you might consider impartial audits of your information security system, just to check things out.
In the immortal words of George Strait,
It’s the little itty, bitty, teenie, weenie thing
They call the lovebug.’
It might only have been small, but it was beautifully put together, and caused a lot of damage, and loss of revenue. It needs more than just a can of bug-spray!
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The author of this piece is Lesley Ward Bsc is a director of SWA Ltd a specialist Information Security Provider based in Cheltenham Spa, UK. SWA offer its service to the public and private sector nationally. SWA can be contacted by telephone +44 (0) 1242 703290 ~ Email admin@swa-solutions.com Web site www.swa-solutions.com