 Qian
is a 39-year-old IT Specialist for a medium-sized training
company in Beijing. For the size of the company, the IT department
is fairly small (only four people), but everything runs pretty smoothly.
Qian always loved computers growing up and got an IT degree in school,
but didn't like programming enough to code full time. This job was
great for him because it involved the best of several different technology
worlds.
On a Wednesday during the month of May, Ping from the Accounting department arrived at work and opened an mail from a trainer in Shanghai and then the attachment "relatedINFO.exe." That's when all the real trouble started!
Immediately, Ping's desktop wallpaper changed to a beach scene with a palm tree, and her computer secretly sent an infected e-mail to everyone in her address list. It all happened in a matter of seconds, and at the same time Li got a fake alert message to restart her computer. She did. Big mistake! It didn't come back on.
Qian was at his desk when the infected mail arrived, but didn't notice it immediately. Of course, Ping called him because her computer didn't restart properly. Qian looked down at his inbox, realized what was happening and flew into action!
Qian made an announcement over the intercom that everyone should take their hands OFF their computers and listen closely. Everyone who had mail open should immediately delete the dangerous items and close out of e-mail.
The rest of the IT team was away at a conference on the other side of town so he called his boss on his mobile and had all of them come back to the office.
Qian didn't know exactly what this threat was, but he knew he had to protect the servers and everyone's PC if he could. He ran to the server room, punched in his security code, and checked to make sure the machines were all still running normally.
Back at his desk Qian ran a set of diagnostics on the servers remotely, and everything seemed to be humming along. Whatever had infected them was dormant at least for the moment. It wasn't creating junk files or erasing hard disks. He stopped all outgoing mail to the trainers in the field and pulled a phone list out of the employee database and ran that over to HR. They had to call everyone outside of HQ and tell them they shouldn't log in or open e-mail until they heard it was safe.
Next, Qian went to the website of their virus software provider and found a warning on the home page about the "Beach Worm." It was a brand new nasty one from Asia that worked a lot like the "Love Bug" from a couple of years ago. A protection profile would be available in two to three hours for auto-download.
Fortunately this worm didn't destroy data, but including the time
to manually reconfigure many of the local desktop and remote laptop
PCs it took them about five days to get back to normal productivity
and cost the company over $20,000 USD. If Qian hadn't acted so quickly,
it easily could have been five times worse!
The individuals and events depicted in the Day-in-the-Life profiles
are likenesses created to reflect situations that may be encountered
while working in the respective fields or positions and are not intended
to reflect or represent specific individuals, jobs, positions or situations.
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