security-scan

My summer work is not
going as well as I would have hoped for at the start. 
Basically it's been a disaster.  I think the only reason they
are keeping me is because they legally have no reason to fire me and
since I am a student they would look really bad firing me for
nothing.  THough I personally would say that I wouldn't be
surprised if they'd be willing to take that risk because of recent
events.  

I have been working for this company all summer as an assistant to the head accountant.  My assignments include checking his e-mails and filtering out the bad ones, making an ocean's worth of coffee, and copying every single piece of paper that comes through the office.  The first assignment has proven to be the most difficult and the most dangerous so far.

Last week there was this huge outbreak of computer glitches within our network.  It was found quickly by the IT people and so it didn't spread any further than that, but it had done its damage. Everything was in shambles and people had no way of accessing their accounts.  We found out just yesterday that many people had their financial information stolen because their cards were coming up with lots of charges all around the world.  They also told us how it all started.

Basically there is a security scan program that I have to run every single e-mail through before I send it off to the boss to read. My computer is totally secure and so I can view anything and it will tell me if there is bad coding anywhere around it.  Apparently the shortcut I was using to speed up this extremely boring job was not a very good one and about half the messages missed the web application scanning.  There are no vulnerability scanner programs on the bosses end so when he opened a bad e-mail it was all over after that.  

Currently the entire network within our accounting division is being rebuilt and recoded.  They need to start everything from scratch and throw away the old software because cleaning it all up would take weeks and they only have days to spare.  For now I am the black sheep of the office, till the fall anyway.