This weekend was rather eventful, and we learned a valuable lesson about viruses, security software, and professional scepticism in IT environments. I've briefly documented it below so you can learn from our mistakes.

Last week Wednesday a virus was detected on a client's network. The anti-virus (AV) host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) was updated to block access to the URLs the virus was using to fetch its payload and other control instruction.. However, the domain lookups[1] to these URLs increased massively by Friday, so much so, they caused the internal firewalls to fail due to the load from trying to inspect this traffic. Domain lookups were then blocked at the firewall, but the source of the lookups persisted. However, network access was restored and outwardly there was nothing wrong.

I'm sure this is a global trend, but certainly within SA, there is a nasty creeping use of all sorts of unnecessary and redundant (see what I did there) phrases. I've decided to keep track of some of them here, so that I can be publicly called-out if I'm ever caught using these. I also hope, that it will help you to stop talking "business" and start speaking sense.