A day in the life with ... Melissa!
By Lisa M. Bowman
March 29, 1999
ZDNN

Workers in Motorola Inc.'s Fort Worth Texas IT division didn't have to go looking for Melissa.

She paged them.

The Melissa virus, which sends e-mail to the first 50 entries in an Outlook users address book, quickly found the IT department employees -- whose pagers and corresponding e-mail addresses all begin with the number 1.

"My pager started ringing every three minutes. That was an indication of how rapidly this thing spreads," Monica Franco, senior manager of Information Technology at the office, said.

The paging began at about 4:45 p.m. on Friday night -- right as workers were preparing to leave their office for the weekend.

Just minutes before the paging frenzy, the first employee to receive the virus came into the IT office, alarmed that he'd received a list of porn sites, purportedly from someone he knew.

The worker also contacted human resources, worried that the sender had violated the company's code of conduct by transmitting the adult addresses.

Makings of a nightmare?
Soon Franco and her IT department put two and two together -- realizing that the paging was actually a virus trying to replicate itself. They did a little math and realized it had the potential to spread 19,000 times within Motorola (NYSE:MOT) alone. It had the makings of an IT nightmare. "We thought it would be a disaster," she said.

The virus -- which has hit corporations, government systems and universities around the world since surfacing Friday -- comes in an e-mail with the subject line "Important message from" followed by the name of someone you know. Attached to the message is a document containing a macro virus and a listing of porn sites. When people open the document, the macro triggers 50 e-mails, meaning the virus multiplies exponentially.

By 6:00, the Franco's team had de-coded the virus and began looking for a patch. By 6:45, the Fort Worth division's 15-person crisis team, made up of people from offices as divergent as legal and sales, had gathered at the office. For the next six hours, they proceeded to inoculate their 2,000 employees from the prolific program.

The communications team developed flyers, 8 x 11 sheets of paper, they taped to everyone's computer, warning them not to open e-mails with the subject "Important message from." They put up posters on every entrance outlining the virus' features. They left urgent voice messages on everyone's machines.

Patches, updates and warnings
Meanwhile the IT team downloaded and ran a patch Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) had sent them. They updated anti-virus software on every machine. In addition, they wrote some code that popped up before workers logged onto their NT system, cautioning them about the virus. They took down the division's Internet connection for several hours.

Six hours after Melissa first struck, they had cleaned more than 45 MB of virus off the machines. By Saturday morning, Web connections were back up.

Still, Franco worries about what would've happened if the virus had struck at a busy time, say Monday morning. "Some people here worked through the night," she said. "It would have been a disaster if we hadn't identified it Friday."

See Also:
'Melissa' virus swamps corporate e-mail

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