The $100,000 Screensaver

from the a-bargain-at-half-the-price dept

Here's one for the IT folks reading the site who can't stand people installing stuff on their own and making life difficult for others. It's the story of a law firm where a few people at the firm got some spam about some "great new screensavers" which they decided to install... which unleashed some sort of malicious file that eventually meant the entire network was shut down, and each PC had to be cleaned up individually, for a total cost of somewhere around $100,000. Who are these people who aren't skeptical of spam?
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    VonSkippy, 23 Mar 2005 @ 10:26pm

    IT Dept should be fired

    They're called Group Policies, and it would have saved the company $100K if their IT Staff had heard of them.
    What moron's, then to top off their stupidity, they have to outsource the clean up.
    //file in the ever growing "some people should not be allowed to use computers" file//

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Got punctuation?, 23 Mar 2005 @ 10:39pm

      Re: more on morons

      No apostrophe, please, in morons (not moron's). Also, semicolons can be quite useful.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    slim999, 24 Mar 2005 @ 8:35am

    No Subject Given

    The bigger issue here is that the law firm clearly had either no system administrator, or a maroon for one.

    (Yes, I know it's misspelled ... if you don't get the reference, well then you spent too little time watching cartoons as a kid.)

    It's quite common for smallish firms to work this way, where they have some outsourced IT business come in every few months to update and upgrade things.

    You get what you pay for. As you lawyers like to say: "Caveat Emptor."

    I'll not get into the obvious solution here, which is to first kill all the lawyers. (Hat Tip: William Shakespeare.)

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    knight37, 24 Mar 2005 @ 11:15am

    Lawyers get Violated

    So a bunch of lawyers got infected with viruses? Poetic justice is a beautiful thing.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.