The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) will be holding an open house on Saturday, June 22 from noon to 5 pm. Located in Moss Landing, MBARI specializes in the use of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to study the midwater and deep ocean. They operate a 35.66 meters long small water-plane area twin hull (SWATH) research vessel which will be in dock for touring. This type of vessel provides a very stable platform for launching the ROVs.

For more information go to:

http://www.mbari.org/news/oh-tours.html

In general, MBARI is not open to the public except once a year during its open house.

In the February 15th ITSS Digest we reported news about the installation of software to detect and block viruses and worms contained within incoming E-Mail. (Mail Gateways "Catch Bugs" and "Eat Worms"!). The frequency of virus attacks is growing, and they are getting more sophisticated, and often quite destructive.

The recent KLEZ family worm came to Stanford email gateways by the thousands each day. In April, Stanford's incoming mail gateway removed more than 36,000 of the KLEZ viruses; the outgoing mail gateway removed about 3,000 (see the description of the virus below). These infected messages could have damaged hundreds of computers at Stanford, if not caught by the Gateway. And, while this most recent virus made up a majority of those caught, they still only accounted for 50% of the total viruses intercepted. For those interested, there is a brief description of the virus below.

While the E-Mail gateway virus catcher has made a major improvement in our protection to the Stanford community, it is also important that each desktop also update their Norton anti virus software. This can be done easily from the internet. Check with you local desktop support person if you do not know how to do these updates, or submit a request via HelpSU (http://helpsu.stanford.edu). You may also call 5-8181 for assistance.

KLEZ family worm: - this worm spreads via the desktop address-book. It then changes the outgoing email address in the FROM: field. It obtains the email addresses by stealing addresses from the infected user's address book. This causes a non-infected user to appear as the person who has sent this worm's malicious email. It does this to hide the real sender of the infected email. To make detection harder, the subject, msg body and attachments are randomly selected from the worm's list.

-Susan Feng (sfeng@stanford.edu), TSS/ITSS

[If, by chance, you do not have a virus detection program installed, download Norton AntiVirus from the Essential Stanford Software page. http://ess.stanford.edu. - Ed.]

SUL/AIR has the following new position this week.

For a complete description of open positions within SUL/AIR, visit the recently redesigned Opportunities for Employment page on the Human Resources Web site.