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Redmond, WA - Clayton Simons, Vice-president of Power Distribution
from Microsoft, announced today that the rolling power outages would
continue until the Blaster worm was eradicated.
 The
Blaster or LoveSan worm exploits the DCOM RPC vulnerability in Windows
2000 and Windows XP machines. The worm tries to launch an attack
against windowsupdate.com.
"We are targeting areas on the grid which seem to have the
most Blaster worm activity," said Simons. "While the power
is off, the computers can't attack us with a futile denial of service
attack, and additionally other computers can't be infected. The fact
that some computers may be destroyed in the ensuing power surges
as power is restarted and new copies of Windows will have to be purchased
with them is only an added bonus."
Regional power authorities remained in the dark about Microsoft's
claim that the software company controls the power grid.
"We're pretty sure we're in control of power distribution in
this region," said a puzzled DTE Energy spokesperson Darryl
Hurlbert.
"Haha, that's a laugher," guffawed Simons. "I supposed
we've kept those power companies in the dark long enough. Microsoft
was given control of the international power grid as part of the
'settlement' with the Department of Justice."
"The lengthy blackout that blanketed the entire region wasn't
intended to stop the spread of the Blaster worm, but that was the
result. When we saw the decrease in the Blaster worm activity during
that time we decided to take advantage of the accidental discovery," explained
Simons.
Simons denied that the first outage was a result of a security patch
to Microsoft Power Gridder XP.
Simons was asked why Microsoft didn't just target individual computers
instead of targeting entire regions.
"We could target the individual computers, but then privacy
advocates would go nuts. Plus, we couldn't take out any Mac or Linux
machines that way," laughed Simons.
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