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Death To Virus Writers
davemie writes: "Looks like everyone is out to get the virus writers now!.
But it sure is funny when a friend double-clicks on that latest virus and sends everyone in the company a copy.
You get to slag him/her off for the rest of the week :-) 'Virus writers are the lowest form of life. AnchorDesk's David Coursey says we should put them out of their misery with a
quick, permanent solution. Why waste time and money with due process?' I spent a total of an hour and forty minutes on hold making two different calls to the ISP which serves my mail. Both times the polite phone reps I eventually reached were shocked to find that there was an Outlook-borne nastiness filling up customers' mailboxes.
What about MSCEs?
Put virus writers and spammers into gladiator contests. Once they've whittled down to one surviving spammer or virus writer, shoot him.
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The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
I can just see it: A "Special Presidential National Security Finding" or some such that gets virus writing equated with more conventionally understood varieties of terrorism. Somewhere, late one evening, four black-clad operators slip silently into a house, shoot the dog with a suppressed .22, and disable the house security system. Down the hall, in a bedroom, a teenage boy is working on uploading his latest bit of MS Word or Outlook hell. The plastic bag full of ether-soaked paper towels descends swiftly and soundlessly over his head.
His body is never found...
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I agree with 90% of what you're saying here. But I believe MS deserves special credit for the virus plagues we've seen.
Why? Because the vulnerability of MS machines to viruses is a direct result of business considerations colliding with technical/security ones, and the business considerations rolling over the others.
MS's whole schtick is to leverage dominance in one product to another. That's why they're so into integration. It just doesn't make any sense to have an email program automatically open a file that someone sends you -- at least not for many kinds of files. And it doesn't make sense to have complex vb macros in word processor documents.
Think about how much pain office macro viruses have caused, and how little benefit the average person gets from them. One user in 10,000 probably writes vb code to manipulate office documents. I'm not saying don't make word scriptable -- let people program it through COM. But that would put Delphi on an even footing with VB.
Despite the flames you read here, MS has some of the smartest tech people on the planet. Plenty of people inside of MS knew it was stupid to make an email system that would run programs that come in through the email. People outside of MS complained about it from the start. But the business logic won.
As far as I'm concerned, they don't get nearly enough grief for this stuff. It's different from a buffer overflow in IIS. That's an honest mistake, and you're right, there are plenty of those in Linux.
MS's decision making process about security is corrupt. You can see it in these macroviruses, and you can see it in their lame explanations for why they're pulling Java out of the OS. The security policy dances to the tune of the business logic people. They don't care about the billions it costs their customers.
I know they fixed the outlook hole. And I would even say that they have the right to leave java out, as long as OEMs have the freedom to put it in. (Whether or not they really do -- contract aside -- remains to be seen. If I were at Dell, I'd be afraid of po'ing MS, no matter what their press releases say.) They are getting better on security. After years of outlook viruses they plugged the hole -- for the small percentage of users smart enough to dl the patches.
Let's roast them for their real problems. Because when the press gets bad, they do respond, and that will make the world a better place. As everyone who uses the product knows, the MS-SQL Server story was BS, a cheap shot. This is proof that there are still plenty of fair shots to go around.
Each word doc has a GUID attached with it. The author of the Melisa virus didn't remove his, making him very easy catch (same GUID on documents on his website)
I've never heard of anyone including an personal email address, though.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
From: NISA CIRT
Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 8:04 PM
Subject: CIRT ALERT: Web Traffic Limited to Military Sites Only
** Unclassified - For Official Use Only **
As of 1900 hours, 19 July 2001, the Joint Task Force-Computer Network
Operations (JTF-CNO) has ordered that the DoD gateways be disconnected
from the Internet on TCP port 80 (protocol http) from now until a time to
be announced. The reason for this outage is the proliferation of the Code
Red worm.
All traffic between military installations will continue without
interruption. However, access to domains other than *.mil will be
limited. This restriction means that connections through a commercial
ISP, such as AOL or Earthlink, will not be available. Your military
organizations web-based Outlook will not be accessible from a commercial
ISP. Furthermore, if you are connecting from your office, you will not be
able to access *.com, *.net or other non-mil domains.
Any questions regarding this outage should be directed to the agency or
service CERT or JTFCND.
** Unclassified - For Official Use Only **
Best Slashdot Co
Viruses have just lost their mystique. I remember my Dad telling me about Michelangelo back in the 80's. I remember being so impressed that something so devilish and evil could really exist.
I suppose that's why I became a programmer.
No, wait. It was for the babes.
Freakin script kiddiez.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
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150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
The DMCA bans distribution of TPM circumvention devices absolutely, without regard to knowledge or intent. It treats circumvention devices on par with stolen property in this regard. Since Sircam forwards one file off of your computer it circumvents login and read permissions that control access to a copyrighted work.
Thus everyone who executes (falls victim) to the sircam virus is guilty of a 1201(b) violation for distributing circumvention devices.
Obviously anyone who receives the trojan email has a cause of action, but actually anyone who uses the TPM in questions does too. That is, everyone who uses a computer that is susceptible to sircam can sue anyone who fell victim to it (in addition to the person who wrote it).
Anybody know anyone at the MPAA, RIAA, or Adobe that got hit?
You would think that Norton AntiVirus 2001 7.0 would filter it as well. After all, that's what it's designed to do.
.DOC Word file that you know he's been working on, and he's usually too busy to check his spelling and grammar for every quick note. Your NAV scanner clearly checks it (there is an animated system tray icon that shows it working.) So you open it...
Yet, if you have a look at Symantec's Discussion Forums you will see many NAV2001 users complain that their e-mail scanner does not pick up SirCam attachments. Detaching those same attachments and running a manual scan of them then does find SirCam. Thois has been an issue since day 1 of SirCam (six days now) and Symantec still has yet to acknowledge it.
So you're a corporate user. You have a locked-down image with hidden extensions. Your NAV templates are up-to-date. E-mail scanning is active. You receive an e-mail from your boss with the title and attachment as a
Sometimes it's not always the user's fault.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
The last thing in the world I want is Linux/BSD/Mac OS to become the mainstream operating system of choice. With Microsoft ruling the roost, I will never be poor. Instead of punishing these virus/worm writers and the script kiddies, I would like to erect a monument to praise their work. Without them, I would be destitute.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Tempting as it might be to go after the virus writers when something like this happens, the real problem is the buggy insecure code which lets it happen in the first place.
I'm not just picking on Microsoft - open-source projects have had their fair share of security holes as well.
But the fact is that Outlook, ISS, and various other products didn't even have security as an afterthought, it was just no thought at all. The charge shouldn't be "kill the virus writers", it should be "stop buying unsecure software".
After all, if you left your front door open for a week, and someone made off with your stereo, I'd argue that you had it coming. I'm not sure viruses are any different -- we just need to secure our damned software.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Oddly, though, with this SirCam outbreak, I find more of my wrath landing on those who help spread the stupid thing. Every single one of the hundreds of emails I have received thanks to SirCam resulted from some otherwise intelligent person being incredibly negligent about network security. I have spent significant amounts of my own time paying for their lack of caution.
I have taken to sending a standard reply to each person from whom I receive SirCam, pointing out that connecting to the net without proper precautions in place is both silly and rude. I'm hoping to trigger a shame response that will motivate people to think about security enough to avoid being so rude again.
If we can foster a culture in which abetting the spread of a virus or worm though lax security is considered a serious social faux pas, we may have be able to contain them better. People are motivated by considerations of power, prestige, and group acceptance; push those buttons properly, and you can sculpt behavior as you will.
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Which is part of the problem. People who sell folks on bad solutions because it also spells job security
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
is the same punishment strong enough for first posters?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
What's a sig?
Don't bother killing the writers. Just the people who work in your company who really think that their friends would write them mail with " Hi Friend I need you help" as a subject line.
--The space between my ears was intentionally left blank--
How many virus writers go on to live normal, productive lives? How many never write another virus?
(Ah, to heck with it. Kill 'em all and let DoS sort 'em out!)
Tim
From the article:
Perhaps if we let a certain former Texas governor order the killing of virus writers, he might refrain from killing retarded adults, people who committed their crimes as juveniles...
The real kicker here is that most of the viruses out there have been created by... you guessed it... juveniles.
They're juvenile in mind if not in body at least...
There's a reason we call these people 'script kiddies'. Steve Gibson, of grc.org fame beleives that the k1dd3s DOS'ing his site are no older than 12 or 13. I would imagine that most of the people who downloaded this virus creation kit are just about as old.
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'hey everybody, I'm looking at porn!'
I think that kind of virus is a high form of human pathos and should be encouraged, always.
Now I've had to deal with weeks and weeks worth of anti virus and anti anti virus (yea, McAfee is worse than the virii sometimes) crap but virii remind all of us that computers are, well computers and we're, well, the people. Do you understand? They reinforce the roles so often blurred or ignored, we must be the responsible, semi-cognizant ones in the relationship, we can't rely on them to think for us, etc. Basic hacker ethos. Virii are like big snow storms (or rolling blackouts), they shut things down, disrupt the normal clean flow of days and power and make people look around their momentarily decontextualized surroundings and maybe, think with some perspective.
Besides, with out the Anna virus we'd never know how many top executives are *eager* to look at tennis porn. Right?
I'm actually serious. Yes, they suck and yes they're mostly written my morons and yes PE infectors at least require a modicum of computer knowledge and yes destructive and yes. But I'd rather have them, at this stage in the game.
closed minded is as closed minded does
funny, most people think that about journalists....
You would think that MS would have put in something to stop this by now. Maybe a "are you really sure?" "are you really really sure?" type nested dialog boxes... :-D
many virus writers are dumb enough to put their e-mail in the stupid code.
Screw 3...