Four Kids Confess to Goner Worm

imrdkl writes: "4 kids in Israel have confessed to writing and distributing the Goner worm, according to Fox." Yet another annoying worm comes and goes, wasting countless IT hours, to say nothing of bandwidth. The kids face up to five years -- of course since they aren't in the U.S., they might actually be punished.

Comments

Well blahs all around

[GlassUser]

At work, we got it about 1100 EST. One user got it and ran it, and it cascaded. Our servers groaned for about 30 seconds, by that time, the mail admin had run into the server room and yanked the network cable to them. Honestly, I don't think the fault rests on these kids at all. Sure, I guess they should face punishment if they broke the law, but that's their country's problem. I don't blame them.

If our users had listened to the rules, this wouldn't have been a problem. But within 30 seconds of the attachment entering our network, over 50 users had run it. Why can't someone hold the irresponsible user at fault? The instructions are easy - don't run attachments you weren't expecting. Instead of blaming some kids for playing around with code, why can't we find fault in the people that don't follow their instructions?

Yeah, I'm ranting, but to make something constructive out of my waste of bandwidth, how can we get the users to listen? Anyone have effective tools? Yeah, I'm all for firing the ones that can't observe policy, but that would mean firing my boss too. And she's actually pretty decent, as far as managers go.

Re:Well blahs all around

[mce]

It's not just users who are stupid. I know of an admin who actually used Goner to defend the ongoing introduction of Outlook at the place where he works.

Here's what happened: they were hit at 17:50 local time, at about 18:00, the first of four Outlook
lusers clicked on the attachment, which made the few admins who were still at work aware of the
problem. As they immediately went into action, they were able to get the mail servers under control pretty quickly (relatively speaking, that is). Next day, however, a scan of the network
revealed that about 50 additional PCs had to be cleaned up. These belonged to people who still use Netscape to read their mail and had also activated the worm. It didn't spread from there, but it did disable the virusscanners, so...

Next thing, that admin that I'm refering to claims: "Fortunately, we have Outlook installed on a few PCs already, because that is how we found out just before leaving for home. If everybody still used Netscape, a lot more PCs would have been infected during the evening, night, and morning before the helpdesk would have noticed the problem."

Sadly, this really is a true story...

Re:Well blahs all around

[slackergod]

This is more like handing someone a handgrenade,
with an attached note saying "pull this pin,"
and that person then proceeding to pull it,
even though they have been told OVER AND OVER
that if they pull the pin on a hand grenade,
it will hurt them.

The virus is dormant, completely harmless
UNTIL SOMEONE RUNS IT.
The fact that someone wrote and engineered it
to spread in this way, and convince people to run
it, they (the writers) should be held accountable.

But just because they are responsible doesn't
mean every other person down the line
isn't responsible as well.

Makes me think of an episode of Space Ghost Coast To Coast (Snatch, I think..)
which goes something like this:

"The rays... Its... Its feeding on the rays!"
"Then don't shoot it!"
"But.. The rays... It's feeding on them! Ohh."

Re:Well blahs all around

[Mike1024]

Hey,

Honestly, I don't think the fault rests on these kids at all.

A quick article reference:

Once inside a user's system, it [Goner] deletes anti-virus and firewall programs, then installs scripts to allow hackers to access the computer and use it as a platform for denial-of-service attacks.

This was not a blameless accident. It wasn't a mistake, that wasn't meant to be released. It was a specially written virus designed to build a 5cr1p7 k1d33 DDOS network.

I don't think they planned to sit around with thier massive DDOS network, not doing anything. Furthermore, they certainly knew what trouble the worm could cause - there is ample precedent for this.

We won't deter future virus writers with a slap on the wrist. They need to be given a sentance that others will look at and say 'I wouldn't want that to happen to me'.

They shouldn't be given a 5-year sentancem granted. I would think that a $5,000 fine and confiscation of thier computer equiptment would to fine. But we can't say 'Blame the users; they aren't following procedure', because if it weren't for script kiddie virus writers, there would be no need for virus-stopping procedures at all.

That's my opinion, anyway.

Michael

We should harness the talents of 5cRi7K1DDI35

[el'gwato]

Instead of being punished (in the usual way) for this annoying act of internet vandalism the Israeli government should make them pay for their crimes in a way that will harness their talents. Maybe some form of Internet good will, like 2 years doing mindless computer support for a charity organisation.
These kids are to young to go to gaol and the outcome of confining the kids to a cell for up to five years will only make them criminals.
I just think the punishment should fit the crime and actually make a difference to the outcome of such young and talented delinquents lives :)

Re:What drives a script kiddie?

[CTho9305]

When I was 15 I was like that. I really don't remember why I thought that stuff was cool, it just was. Thankfully I grew out of it.

Hmmm, maybe if there are more crackdowns on script kiddies and more slander against that kind of life these kids won't think it's 'cool' anymore. Just a thought

Same here... but I don't think crackdowns will help. I mean, they probably get enjoyment out of their creation growing (until they fully realized what they did). A better idea than crackdowns might be a controlled environment for kids to screw around in...

Of course, one result would be giving crackes experience / promoting it. But giving out free condoms could be viewed as promoting sex...

whatever. I can't see any especially good solution.

This Is Bullshit

[Lethyos]

The kids face up to five years, of course since they aren't in the US, they might actually be punished.

Computer crimes are MORE than sufficiently punished in the US, thank you very much. I don't know where you get off implying that the US goes easy on computer "crime". I had a little incident during my freshman year of college. The FBI was very determined to get me jail time for a ridiculously minor offense. It was only through sheer wit and creativity of my laywers that we got the offense down to a misdemeanor and a lousy 600$US fine. That was the most hellish time of my entire life and could have ruined my career forever. All over a tiny little deal (no damage was done).

Imagine what these kids would get in the US for writing such a worm. It'd be a helluva lot worse than 5 years in prison. So put your pro-punishment attitudes away and get real. Remember what our government does to computer criminals.

Re:This Is Bullshit

[loraksus]

Did you know that you can get off on murder in 3 years?
The FBI should be actually doing their jobs and hunting down murderers, rapists and people who actually hurt other people instead of hunting down people who write programs to piss people off.
Put shit into comparison for a second.

Re:they didn't do anything wrong.

[joel8x]

I guess you think the architects should have been held accountable for the twin towers not withstanding a plane hitting them. I hate M$'s practices as much as the next guy, but you can't hold them responsible when someone else knowingly takes advantage of a problem that they did address in hotfixes and patches! Sure it proved that there are still a lot of ignorant people out there who spread these worms, but the people who write them and send them out into the population are no better than the people stuffing Anthrax into envelopes and exploiting the U.S. postal service. These kids are electronic terrorists and we should take this offense seriously.

Re:What drives a script kiddie?

[Bandito]

If you do any kind of programming, you should have gone through that phase when stuff like that was cool. I remember a time when I thought it would be cool to write viruses or worms. Now, the reason that I thought it would be cool escapes me.

I believe that every programmer, at some point, goes through a phase when they want to try everything under the sun just to say that they can/could/did do it. I never actually wrote a virus myself, but I definitely remember wanting to just for the sake of getting into the guts of a computer and seeing what makes it tick.

Most programmers have also been/are sysadmins. I believe this along with growth/maturity eventually lead to the desire to produce something useful, not destructive, for the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, some never get past it, and some just use pre-fab virus creators. These people for whatever reason didn't move on to the next stage of evolution and probably never will, but at the same time, they keep sysadmins in business and antivirus writers employed.

That's right, punish KIDS...

[tcc]

For grown up security mistakes...

Part of the process of being a kid is learning... While I do not approve destruction or paralizing IT infrastructures, this seriously bugs me depending on the seriousness of the punishment.

Meanwhile, LOADS of spammers are still clugging my Hotmail inbox at a rate of at least 20 spam a day, my ISP email account receives at *LEAST* 5 spams a day, multiply that by X amount of users, THERE'S a big bandwidth waste. These people are still running free and going stronger than ever!

Those lame virus lasts for about a week. If after that, anyone else gets caught, they need to *LEARN* the HARD WAY like "doing backup is a good idea because you never know when your system might fail", well the same should go with "Update that antivirus file, because you never know what might hit you". Heck, the antivirus programs offers to do it automatically, there's no excuses.

Canada does it best

[Error27]

For the kid who DoSed yahoo and cnn a while back. They put him a government reform school for 8 months.

That is enough punishment for a silly prank.

And I can't simpathize with the people who blame the users for openning the attachments. Teaching users not to open emails that have "Hi" as the subject line is only a short term solution. Trying to get users to remember which types of files are executable is not an option either. (Until a year ago, I assumed that .doc files were not executable.)

A better solution is to not allow executable attachments which end in .doc, .vbs, or .exe onto the network.

An even better solution is for Microsoft to fix their programs or for people to not use Microsoft products.

Don't worry too much.

[Apuleius]

They're first time offenders who confessed. They're high school students who would otherwise be preparing to be drafted to the Israeli army soon, and the government will not want to disrupt that if it isn't necessary. Finally, they are from a town that is notorious for inducing boredom for its teenagers. They may get a few months, but I wouldn't count on it, and they'll get assigned to the Ma'asiahu prison, where conditions are very good (it's Israel's prison for first time offenders, and it's probably the only place in the world you could call a re-education camp without irony.)

Re:Same old...

[Croaker]

Why not make it so IE and Outlook have popup-adds with every page and email they view. What if the worm steals their emails and sends them to spammers list automatically? I mean obviously people aren't learning, or this crap wouldn't be happening over and over again. Yeah the people are victims blah blah blah... cry me a river.

Ah yes. It's the user's fault. Damn them for actually using the features in their frigging e-mail clients. How dare they not go through arcane menu commands and figure out how to deactivate features. Let's shoot the slobs now, and totally ignore the fact that lazy-ass developers created all of these problems for the users to begin with.

I've never had a worm, and never will. I'm not claming i'm smart or anything, but its common sense that an emailing "I'm asking for your advice" with a document that ends in scr or vbs is something that joe45@aol.com probably didn't mean to send me.

Oh yeah. very common sense. Unless, perhaps you know joe45@aol.com. Which is the case in most of these "scan the user's address book and send a copy" schemes. That's why it's so successful... e-mails go to people who know, and perhaps trust, the person who launched the virus. Hell, a lot of the viruses are in the form of Word documents, which, believe it or not, are actually passed around via e-mail. See, e-mail is all about communication. People send people things. People open them up. 99.99% of the time, nothing bad happens. That's what e-mail is for. That's why we have attachments. If people aren't supposed to open them, what's the point of having that capability in e-mail clients?

Do you actually expect people to know what the hell a .scr file is? Maybe you've got all of Window's file extensions memorized. Most people I know have more important things to think about.

No, if you want to code up a virus to "fix" this problem, code up one that goes out and downloads and installs an e-mail client that was written by someone with a clue about security. Perhaps install an operating system where something run in userland can't fuck with system files. Hell, write a virus with some AI that can seek out and destroy the source code to lousy e-mail clients, scripting systems that have no concept of security, and operating systems that have no security model to speak of.

In the mean time, screeching at people that doing things that the e-mail clients were designed to do in the first place is grounds for a cyber-anal-raping is about as productive as screeching that they're a witch if they float in water. It may seem obvious to you, but you're not speaking their language.

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Re:they didn't do anything wrong.

[crucini]

I guess you think the architects should have been held accountable for the twin towers not withstanding a plane hitting them.

That's a bad analogy. It's more like four kids pressed a button on the outside of the WTC at street level, causing the towers to explode due to an engineering flaw. In other words, there is no way for a mail message to directly cause harm to your computer. It must be interpreted by a program which you trust (a traitor, in other words) which is willing to harm your computer at the command of an outside party.

I hate M$'s practices as much as the next guy, but you can't hold them responsible when someone else knowingly takes advantage of a problem that they did address in hotfixes and patches!

I absolutely can and do hold them responsible. Their decision to facilitate running programs that arrive in the mail without any kind of sandbox or access restrictions was an obviously dangerous one whose implications were immediately visible to people who understand computers. Microsoft spins their product as the omniscient gatekeeper to the internet and handholder to the clueless. They encourage the computer-illiterate to put their trust in Microsoft rather than learning how computers actually work. They created both the software and the culture that propogate malicious code. All of which means that they are greatly to blame for deliberately bringing into existence email viruses.

Yes! AND Punishment for CIOs/CTOs

[Greyfox]

Writing and releasing a virus, worm or trojan is just as much an act of vandalism as if you'd gone out and smashed peoples' windows in. And you can smash a lot of windows with the Internet. No pun intended for this particular metaphor.

The question that never gets asked is why all these companies were vulnerable to these attacks. I've worked for several Fortune 500 companies and I've yet to see one with good security. You'd think they'd be going out and hiring a bunch of security professionals after Sept 11 but I'm not seeing a whole lot for infosec or security on the job boards.

Until some CIOs and CTOs start losing their jobs over this crap, the cycle will persist.