This is an amusing story. It's also a serious story. The sky really does fall sometimes. Complaisance is a partner to a virus and too many offices disregard planning against them until it's too late and the time for planning is long gone.
April 1997
A small engineering office I've been consulting for for about 4 years recently learned the virus lesson the hard way. No virus had ever graced their halls and little thought had been given them until the Great Michaelangelo Virus Scare at which time a moderate stir occurred
and a few hard drives were scanned. As a conscientious consultant, from time to time I had recommended installing anti-virus scanning programs on all company computers but the office Ayatollah nixed the idea due to the expense of purchasing non-revenue generating software. It would hurt
the bottom line, he felt and, as an indirect result, the Ayatollah's annual bonus. "But there's some great shareware anti-virus programs that aren't that expensive" I told him. The Ayatollah begrudgingly allowed me to distribute McAffee to everyone and tell them to install it-he wasn't about to spend consultant dollars to install shareware. As you can well imagine few actually installed McAffee. Time passed. No virii made their inimical presence known. The Great Michaelangelo Virus Scare slowly puled into a decline.
Enter Windows for Workgroups with Microsoft Anti-virus built in. When I upgraded everyone's box to the new Windows version I made sure MAV was as active as I could make it. Time passed. People changed their configurations. MAV disappeared from many of the workstations. Data entry clerks worked quietly-unprotected. CAD geeks worked - naked to a virus attack. The office was quiet except for the occasional rantings caused by GPFs and the usual Windows weirdness.
This office is populated by engineers, chemists, rockheads
(geologists), and a variety of other science types that are surprisingly (considering their technical backgrounds) not particularly computer literate. Some of these guys crank on some abstruse statistical and modeling programs that any geek would gawk at but don't know how to change directories. They're constantly losing files because they don't know how to do a Save As. Their root directories are full of orphan files with cryptic names like tits.doc or billmemo.wow.
Every office has to have a guy like Mr. Disk. Mr. Disk is pretty quiet, basically a computer neophyte, likes to tinker with his system but never actually crashes the whole network (every office also has to have a dolt that crashes the whole network regularly but we'll cover that guy in another column), and will soon develop into a competent propeller head. Mr. Disk runs Defrag twice a day, loves Norton Desktop, and every time he sees me running chkdsk says "why don't you run scandisk instead?"
Mr. Disk calls me up one day and says "We've got a virus." "Right", I say. "I'll come out in a couple of days a check it out." "no, really," he says. "I just ran MAV and if you want to come over and take a look at it on the screen I'll show it to you." Mr. Disk is a good type of guy to cultivate at a client's shop so I scooted right over and, sure enough, the execrable Form A virus had turned up.
So I cleaned everything in sight, excoriated the bootleg Doom players to keep their jackleg software at the house and showed up the next morning at the client's general staff meeting to listen to the Ayatollah chunder on about productivity and deliver a short lecture on virus protection. I tried not to gloat openly about my virus prescience but the Ayatollah still wanted to approach the problem on-the-cheap. Following his direction I announced to the staff meeting that an insidious virus lurked and
everyone should load and run the new version of McAfee I passed out and check all their floppy disks too. This created much less of a stir than I thought it would. One harpy went on for a few minutes about how impractical it
was to check every disk and that their must be a better way. "Like I said," I said. "Check every floppy." Then we went on to hearing about the new forms necessary for expense reports and whether they were to be filled out in triplicate of quadruplicate.
Since my picayune ramblings about virus protection didn't seem to have any immediate fungible value, the Ayatollah sent me packing, wishing to cut short my ticking consultant's time clock.
Surprise, surprise. Two weeks later, holding the phone two feet from my ear, I heard the Ayatollah bellow in a surprising loud moo "the damn virus is everywhere! We're losing files! You've gotta come over here immediately and do something!" So me and my assistant geek trotted
off to the Ayatollah's office armed with the latest version of Norton Anti-Virus and F-ProT. When we entered the lobby (this really happened, I swear!) an engineer was handing a disk to a secretary saying "I need this printed out right away. Now this disk has the virus on it so be careful." My geek and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.
Almost every workstation had the Form virus and a random sampling of floppies in plain sight on various desks were also infected. After about 45 minutes of running anti-virus programs I corralled my geek and headed to the Ayatollah's office where we closed the door behind us.
We didn't have to say anything. He knew. "Bring your geek in tomorrow (Saturday), lock the doors behind you and fix it. I don't care what it takes" (music to any consultant's ears). My geek and I looked at each other significantly and silently filed out.
We worked all weekend. We inoculated systems. We ran FDisk on the damaged computers. We looked in the back of every drawer and scanned every floppy we found. We found Form A and Stoned Monkey. We charged them a lawyer's fortune. We'll probably get to do it all again in a year or so.
Oh yeah, it turned out the boss was bringing the virus from home on floppies - his wife was a university student and apparently was picking up the virus over and over again from the computer lab.
