Computer virus writers at war, security firm says

'....... "The latest variants of Bozori even remove competing viruses like Zotob from the infected machines," Hypponen said in a statement on the company's Web site.

The worms were blamed for major system trouble at some media outlets and companies in the United States on Tuesday, causing personal computers to restart repeatedly and potentially making them vulnerable to attack.'

New worms hit U.S. media outlets, companies
" The worms, including two called "IRCBOT.WORM" and "RBOT.CBQ", exploit a recently discovered flaw in Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows 2000 operating system and were causing personal computers at more than 100 U.S. companies to restart repeatedly and potentially exposed them to attackers who could take control of a system."

MY opinion: w0w, another "service" performed by the worm writers, finding unpatched systems" Does this show up in Performance Reviews? Is IT/MIS an unnecessary expense, in this profit driven market? so many questions, so few good answers OR practices, it seems...

"This is the most significant threat we've seen in at least 12 months," said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of the anti-virus emergency response team at McAfee Inc. (MFE)

But Symantec Corp. (SYMC) and McAfee, the top two computer security companies, as well as Microsoft, said that damage to computer systems on Tuesday was limited and was not likely to cause widespread havoc like other malicious software programs such as SQL Slammer and MyDoom."

Ok, why the dramatic difference in opinion? The Symantec response seems to mirror Microsoft's statement. I wonder what your opinion is if your servers kept rebooting? Perspective is everything ;)

--MissM