So the Blaster Worm is out and causing all sorts of havoc. I first saw this last night when I was with my fiancee and her computer announced that it was going to shut off because of an RPC call. Scratching my head for a while, I couldn't Google anything and thought that it was a local bug. But, when I got home and got to Google Groups, I found out that it was a new RPC exploit with most all versions of Microsoft Windows. Looks like Microsoft decided to leave a backdoor open for RPC calls, how nice. The patch was up on Microsoft's site to shut off the port and close off this security hole. I did not find out the flip side to this story till I got to work today and saw the number of actual infected machines. The symptoms that I saw with my fiancee's machine was what the worm did. I did not actually see the worm on my fiancee's computer. At work it was half and half. Half the group was getting their machines shut off every freaking five minutes, the other half was unable to use Microsoft products (svchost.exe errors) and their machines was using so much bandwidth that they couldn't download any patches or fixes. So what's a Microsoft Windows user going to do? Call on the Linux geek, of course. I run Red Hat Linux 9 on my desktop machine and that box was happily purring along, doing everything that I need it to do. So I downloaded patches and helped everyone get their machines going today. Another win for Linux and loss for Windows. The worm author put in the worm: "[i]Billy Gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!![/i]" Hmm, true, true. Billy, why?