150,000 idiots were recorded as of August 28th to have fallen victim to its evil charms and to now have an auto-power down feature on their PCs and networks.
The ingenious, if evil, inventor of this piece of anti-Microsoft propaganda designed the worm to burrow into the infected computer and cause it to reboot every ten minutes. However, he was courteous enough to provide a timer alert warning which tells the user the computer is being powered down in the next 60 seconds. You can’t argue with its manners, or, it seems, its resourcefulness; the patch required to protect a computer (and save it) from this ten-minutely death can be downloaded all over the place, for free, in a mere quarter of an hour…Upon realising this, one victim wisely observed, “I’m screwed.”
Since the Blaster first struck on August 11th, 2003, cyber geeks and software companies have been quick to offer speedier an more effective solutions to the worm – and all at very competitive rates. TheHumourStopsHere is currently not at liberty to divulge the details of such quick-save keys, for legal reasons of deprivation of profit to those clever computery people.
Since the enormous success of Blaster, as with Napster, many variants and replacements have found their way onto the Internet. Sobig was released on August 19th, closely followed by the creatively named Blaster.E, Blaster.A, Blaster.B, and not forgetting Blaster.Gotcha.You.Dumb.Net.Surfers.
Advice offered to computer users who are at risk includes not opening e-mails sent to them by ambiguous and unknown entities with large attachments and names so genuine and specific as “Your Bill” and “Hey it’s me”. Alternatively, lift the computer base precisely seven inches from your desk, reach around the back, unplug all the cables, and drop it out of a third floor window.
-September 2003