Word: bug
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Governments, too, felt the pain. In London, Parliament shut down its servers before the Love Bug's assault. "This affectionate greeting," intoned Commons leader Margaret Beckett, "contains a virus which has immobilized the House's internal communication system...
...systems forced an atypical silence in the halls of Congress, as well as some unusual scrambling. Arriving early on a day dominated by the death of John Cardinal O'Connor, New York Congressman Joseph Crowley's press secretary, Josh Straka, logged on to his computer only to unleash the bug. He spent the rest of the day manually faxing press releases. "My stress level was through the roof," he says...
...bug infected 80% of all federal agencies, including both the Defense and State departments, leaving them temporarily out of e-mail contact with their far-flung outposts. Though Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon insisted there were other lines of secure communications available, the virus corrupted no fewer than four classified, internal Defense Department e-mail systems...
...York City's financial district, the bug hit early risers especially hard. "If I had been here a few minutes later, nothing would have happened," says Vincent Cecolini, an editor for the RIA Group, a publisher of financial books. By the time his company's computer technicians arrived, they found 2,000 corrupted messages in his Out box and spent the rest of the day wrestling with the damage. "I was terrorized," says Cecolini. "My stomach was in knots." Old Westbury, N.Y., businessman Kamal Dandona's experience was even more nightmarish. Organizer of a major Bombay film industry-awards show...
...major antivirus firms quickly posted antidotes--software to neutralize the bug--on their websites, but they were too late to prevent widespread chaos. Desperate for a cure, victims deluged the sites, making them all but inaccessible. McAfee received requests for help from 10,000 affected companies on the first day of the outbreak alone...