Monday,  August 19 12:01 AM EDT

Microsoft to Continue Rolling Blackouts Until Blaster Worm Eradicated

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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