Building The Ubervirus

Johnath writes: "The HNN has a rather eye-opening article about a potential disaster dangling overhead. It's not so much that the ideas presented are revolutionary -- most /. readers would probably come up with a similar scheme, if called upon to design a killer net virus, but nevertheless, it pretty lucidly addresses the potential damage."

Comments

Viruses

[deefer]

I can remember when virus writing used to be _hard_. You had to be a bit 1337 to be able to write a TSR, or a boot block virus.
Now look at the state of the virus world - ILOVEYOU.vbs (OK, it's a trojan, but still replicates like a virus) and the damage it caused. I'm not talking about the x billion the media claim it cost, just the panic in my IT department when virused email couldn't be deleted fast enough. Look at the code for ILOVEYOU.vbs - it is a doddle. No real inspiration involved - just patch 4 entries out off bugtraq together, and there you go.
What we have now is a state of play where the entry level in writing malicious code is dropping rapidly as more and more people get into computers. Don't want to spend a few years learning to code? Hah, our whizbang COMActiveXCORBA plugin gives you the power on your desktop!!!
Don't worry that your soft underbelly is now exposed because we can't give you the ease of use you want, without you knowing what you're doing!!! And you're too stupid to realise!!!
So now that the learning curve has been removed, you will have people all over the net trying to write and run viruses, without a clue of the repercussions it may cause. Because they don't really understand what they are doing.

Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.

We need computer control now

[DonkPunch]

This just goes to prove the insanity of low-cost easily-accesible computers and software in the hands of everyone. Every day, hundreds, perhaps thousands of machines are infected with virus and trojan software. The cost in lost data and productivity is easily in the millions.

We have to stop this madness now.

Right now, computers are less regulated than lawnmowers or automobiles. We require drivers to pass a proficiency test, why not computer buyers? It's time we registered computers and performed background checks on people who buy them. This is the only way to keep computers out of the hands of children and criminals.

I am proposing a Million Geek March. We will have speakers telling stories of how their lives were destroyed by computers. Let's send a message to Washington now: "We need to be safe from computers!" It is absurd that in the year 2000, I have to scan every attachment I receive and every program I download. We need to make our information infrastructure safe again.

All of you who oppose my plan, I ask, "What do you have to fear?" We're not planning to take away your computers. We just want some common-sense legislation for the safety of all. It will be a tough fight -- the rich lobbyists from Dell and Microsoft will try to stop us. They'll claim that the right to access information cannot be restricted. They'll claim that computers aren't the problem. We know they're wrong. Modern computers make it easier than ever to create destructive programs. A computer in the home is a tragedy waiting to happen.

Let's get some common-sense computer regulation now. Thank you.

You could easily get much more nasty than that

[tilly]

Here is a clue.

The Samba folks don't publicize it, but they have found a number of buffer overflows in the stacks of every single OS out there. (They patched the ones they found in Linux.:-) A truly nasty critter would be set up to transmit itself using those overflows.

If done right you would get a worm or virus that can transmit from computer to computer without any manual intervention. There has to date been exactly one such on the internet. The Morris worm. It went out of its way to be nice, and it still shut down the Internet through sheer speed of reproduction.

You see getting a human in the loop slows things down. If you want to be truly nasty, automate it from start to finish. Then the first people will hear about it is when their networks go down.

Cheers,
Ben