Yesterday (because I hadn\’t been reading my work e-mails about virii too thoroughly) I received an e-mail with the subject \”Hokki\” from Berkeley\’s Hawaii Club mailing list. It looked legitimate albiet a bit fishy since the body of the message was just \”WEAH, i don\’t like plaintext\” and a password of numbers. The attached file was Letter.zip Because I was at work and on a Macintosh, I simply opened the attachment. Not once, but twice hoping that some amazing thing would happen. Nothing. :( I couldn\’t infect the Mac.

Turns out that attachment was the Beagle worm. Today, I received several more similar e-mails with the same attachments. From various campus mailing lists. At my work e-mail, I received several from residents. The worse case was when a former Rescomp employee (RCCs are supposed to be very tech geeky and are supposed to be very WARY of opening attachments) sent an infected e-mail the work mailing list. Embarassment, anyone?

What made this worm so easily spread is the way it\’s distributed. Once the user has opened up the file, entered in the password to unzip it, and run the executable…the program installs several files on the computer. One of which scans the entire hard drive looking for files that would contain e-mails. Then it creates a primitive mail server and sends out e-mails with this very attachment to all the addresses it found. But I must say, the e-mail body makes it very personable. How often do you hear a person say weah with a smilie face?

~~~

For my Industrial Design/Human Factors class, we have to create a design notebook. What we have to do is find objects in our daily life that reflect the design concepts in class. I chose the urinal for one of my ten required objects. Then I realized I didn\’t know how a urinal worked and I looked at this powerpoint presentation on how to use a urinal to help me. I never knew there was so much involved!!!