My funny valentine

by Sharky

March 13, 2001 —

Sysadmin pilot fish is weary of the constant tug of war -- the fish pushing for e-mail security policies, Internet permissions and antivirus software, while the boss (himself a former sysadmin) tells fish to ease up on all those unnecessary security procedures fish keeps trying to implement.

So the fish decides to do the reasonable thing and save himself. He takes a similar job at another company.

"Imagine my surprise," says the unsurprised fish, "when I received the 'I Love You' virus from my former boss."

Fish gets more detail when his replacement at the old shop calls to ask where to find the backups for certain files ("The company only backed them up once -- one of the other discussions I had," says the fish).

Seems fish's former boss had run the executable for the virus when he received it -- another violation of the fish's erstwhile sysadmin policies.

And not only did that send the "I Love You" virus to everyone in the boss's address book, but it also triggered the other thing "I Love You" does so well: it deleted 800MB of business graphics files from the company's servers.

Computerworld