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MIT still has over 900 network drops disabled

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Sun Sep 14 01:57:09 2003

Eight weeks after Microsoft's first announcement concerning RPC
vulnerabilities, MIT still has over 900 network drops disabled due to
infected machines on the campus.

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V123/N39/39SoBig2.39n.html

MIT is known for having very bright people.  Imagine the difficulty
people without an MIT education are having trying to fix their Microsoft
computers.

MIT is taking the conservative approach.  MIT Network Security requires
users to reformat their hard drive and re-install their operating system
(and I assume install all the patches) before re-enabling the network
connection.

Could you find your original operating system disks?  Did your computer
even come with a disc copy of the original operating system?  I had
some computers which asked the user to "backup" the original operating
system on 50-90 floppy disks because the vendor only shipped the OS
"pre-installed."  Very few people spent the time (or the discs).

And you are still face with the problem the patches aren't available yet
on physical media (CD, Floppy, etc).  So you need to find a friend with a
fixed computer to make copies of the patches for you.