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Alert timeline for Love Bug

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun May 07 05:53:16 2000

Senator Bennet from Utah wants to know where the FBI was when
the "Love Bug" began circulating through e-mail systems in the
USA.  I thought I would try to figure out when various different
alerts first reached the public from various sources.

Although there may be some "private" alerts earlier, I don't have
a good way to find out their timestamps.  I've tried to normalize
all times to UTC.

4-May-2000 10:17 UTC NANOG posting
4-May-2000 12:54 UTC AP (Hong Kong)
4-May-2000 13:17 UTC Reuters(London)
4-May-2000 13:30 UTC ZDNet News
4-May-2000 13:31 UTC F-Secure press release
4-May-2000 14:30 UTC Financial Services Information Sharing Alert
4-May-2000 14:30 UTC CERT/CC Alert
4-May-2000 14:38 UTC Symantec press release
4-May-2000 15:00 UTC FBI/NIPC Alert
4-May-2000 15:05 UTC Computer Associates press release
4-May-2000 16:19 UTC Trend Micro press release

I think the FBI did pretty well.  In context, the FBI alert came
out approximately the same time as most commercial virus vendor
press releases.  I'm not surprised NANOG beat the FBI or CERT by 4
to 5 hours.  But I think I missed some news reports.  Does anyone
know of any verifiable public alerts  or news stories about
the "Love Bug" before 1017 UTC?