John Pescatore

I’m going to start choosing exercycles at my health club that don’t have a clear view of the televisions. I used to just avoid the bike that was near the TV that was tuned to any business channel, but now just about every station runs a crawl trumpeting the latest bad news.  This morning, even the one that usually only shows infomercials at 5am broke in to tell us that the stock market futures had hit their 6% negative limit – I guess a lot of us will be greeters at WalMart well past 2025 now.

To make things worse, the stock market red ink news was followed by a report about banks in 11 states and the District of Columbia receiving letters containing a suspicious (but later found to be harmless) white powder.  The letters were basically hate mail about the financial crisis – there has been a lot of loss of gruntle out there. This is what I was worried about in a post a few weeks ago.

To take our minds off this, yesterday Microsoft issued an out of cycle patch for a vulnerability that they hadn’t known about until a few weeks ago when they saw active, targeted attacks. This is a Blaster-class vulnerability  that requires expedited patching, pushout of IPS signatures immediately, and blocking of ports 139 and 445 whereever possible until patching is assured. There is already public exploit code coming out, so this is definitely one for which to crankup the emergency patching process.  

And when every is working overtime, keep them away from those TV sets, radio stations and Internet sites with all the depressing news. I have found one site, an old friend, where you can go and always get cheered up: here.