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Seth is a 27 year old IT Specialist for a 180 person training company in Indianapolis with about 100 employees at HQ.
Upwards of 10 billion
dollars is the estimated cost of the
“Love Bug” virus that struck the entire world
in May of 2000. Viruses, hackers, organized
cyber-terrorism, and clandestine internal
threats are all top issues in network security
today. The information technology (IT) industry
drives productivity in business and vice versa,
but if not properly policed, it can all come
to a crashing halt. This costs time, money,
and confidence.
Seth is a 27 year old IT Specialist for a 180 person training company. They are headquartered in Indianapolis with about 100 employees at HQ and the rest are trainers in the field. The IT department is just 4 people, but everything runs pretty smoothly. Seth 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.
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On this particular Wednesday, Emily in accounting
got back from lunch and opened a mail from
a trainer in Denver and then the attachment
“relatedINFO.exe.” That’s when all the real
trouble started!
Immediately Emily’s desktop wall paper changed
to a beach scene with a palm tree and her
computer secretly sent an infected e-mail
to everyone in her address list. This all
happened in a matter of seconds and at the
same time Emily got a fake alert message to
restart her computer. She did. Big mistake!
It didn’t come back on.
Seth was at his desk when the infected mail
arrived, but didn’t notice it immediately.
Of course, Emily called him because her computer
didn’t restart properly. Seth looked down
at his inbox, realized what was happening
and flew into action!
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Seth 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. Seth 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 Seth 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, Seth 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 out of Asia that worked
a lot like the “Love Bug” from a couple of
years ago. A protection profile would be available
in 2 to 3 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 5 days to get back
to normal productivity and cost the company
over $20,000. If Seth hadn’t acted so quickly
it easily could have been 5 times worse!
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Learn
more about a degree in Information Technology |
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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