Comment: User beware the Gap, or How the Sasser Worm got Me

Recently my girlfriend and I purchased a new Sony laptop computer. It came preinstalled with Windows XP and a host of software. All that needed to be installed in order to make it a useful functioning machine was BT Broadband.

I was ill prepared for what came next; I started the installation of BT Broadband with no problems. I was confident as I had installed it before. However, during the installation process a window titled "Norton Antivirus" appeared, and claimed that "My subscription to virus protection updates has expired". I thought that this was a little premature, as the machine had only been turned on for thirty minutes. In the meantime BT Broadband installation had finished and I found myself online.

I started the process of renewing the Norton subscription, finding I could have a few months more for free. However, before I could even finish extending it, Norton popped up another window and proclaimed that my machine had been attacked by a virus, I clicked 'OK' and hurriedly completed the online subscription process.

But the message kept on reappearing; in fact even after rebooting it kept appearing and I noticed that the broadband connection had become extraordinarily slow. At this point a message box appeared that I was familiar with from newspaper reports: Sasser was active on my machine.

Norton although still complaining about attacks had not managed to stop Sasser. It seemed that updates were required: in all fifteen megabytes of data, meantime wondering what Sasser was up to.

Eventually the updates downloaded and Norton requested a reboot to get things going. After a restart, it kindly informed me that my machine was infected with Sasser, and that it could not remove the virus. After another restart, it managed to remove two of the virus instances and asked me whether I wanted to place the other two in quarantine. However, Norton still kept bringing up pop-ups proclaiming that intruder alerts were being detected. Another reboot stopped this too.

So that was an eventful start to what later turned out to be a very pleasant Sunday, but I find myself at a loss to understand exactly who should be responsible for this problem. Should it be Sony, who put the hardware, operating system, and software bundle together? Microsoft, for not switching on a firewall by default? BT Broadband, for not providing some protection for my machines IP address when first entering the Internet? Norton Anti-Virus for not managing to take command of the situation and put up security barriers until it had received online updates for coping with Sasser? Or perhaps I am responsible for knowing what I should have done to avoid this problem?

David N Clarke

Associated Link: David N Clarke's website

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