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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.
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.
funny munging
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Ok heres the basic cycle:
script kiddie/cracker/whatever create worm
worm gets out, spreading by point and click method
IT goes on about how bad this one is
Eventually worm dies and kids are caught
Big deal made over last worm causes more copycat type worms
Cycle restarts
Ok I mean thats pretty general, but goddamn if I'm not sick of all this. How about instead of going after the worm writers (they are not innocent but hear me out), why don't we try to at least educate the public into not opening things they don't know about. I mean what good does blackice and zonealarm do if someone opens a file and turns them off? The technology isn't the problem (except with IIS but thats whole different beast), its the people. Maybe someone (I know I'll be flamed as a bastard for this) should create a worm that actually fucks over the people that open it. Instead of making it so they download some roll-back registry fix, how about you just wipe out the registry? 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. 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.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I, for one, think that they've already suffered enough.
After all, judging by the virus code, it is almost certain that they had to use Microsoft software to create it.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I'm a kid (Senior in High School...) and I've seen kids to stupid things (I've done some stupid things myself too). These things should NOT be punishable by 5 years (unless they are violent). Kids are kids, and then they grow. Putting them in jail for years on end isn't going to make them grow up any faster.
In the US, these same kids can just as easily steal a car, get drunk, and run you over while running a red light. Guess what? With a good plea-bargain, they'll get off in 5 years too.
What's more important, 5 years in the slammer for stupidity or 5 years in the slammer for killing someone? Get your priorities straight people...
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
All speling, factual, tact, and/or grametical errers be the result of netwerk interpherance or# transmition ererrs.
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.
My server
Well, we all know that most organizations' security is so pathetic that any teenager can write a worm to penetrate it. Once again, we have the living proof of that. Once again, everyone blames "evil hackers" instead of addressing the real problem or even so much as hinting that sysadmins, or beter yet, PHBs should take part of the blame. So, what else is new?
BTW, I've read that in Israel white-collar crimes are punished more harshly than normal crimes. For example, if you commit copyright infringment you stand to spend more time in jail than a rapist. Can somebody confirm/deny this? (But then again, it looks like this is the way things are going in the US too with "hackers" being declared terrorists and all...).
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
It's like that TV Commercial that's been playing in the States here:
*Woman peeks her head into IT Manager's office*
"Oh, and Bob, I opened that e-mail virus -- just like you told me not to!"
I don't agree entirely with what you write, since I assign the blame for things like this almost entirely to those who write the stuff in the first place. I'm sure you'll get plenty of other replies saying the same.
OTOH, you make a fair point about employee training. The small company where I work, a software development house, has had a few e-mail viruses mailed to it over the past year or two. It's interesting to note that these often get forwarded around the office, but invariably by non-technical staff. The developers and tech support guys and gals generally have the sense not to run blind attachments; the admin and management guys and gals are more trusting, and bite the bullet.
Our IT support guys have long had a record kept of exactly when everyone runs the anti-virus update they mail round every month. Recently, they've instituted a "leader board", which is mailed to everyone, showing who ran it fastest. It's an amusing little game for those of us who are sitting in front of our PCs anyway, but the really telling thing is the people who don't appear on the list at all (which is typically mailed around the afternoon after the update), i.e., those people who still haven't updated their systems several hours later. Guess who they are...
So, we have established that certain types of users are more vulnerable to this than others, and we know who they are. The next question, of course, is what to do about it. You can come up with any number of penalties, but how are you going to turn around and slap them on, say, the MD of your company (a repeated offender in our case)?
Personally, I always liked the "drill" approach. The IT guys occasionally create a Hotmail account or some such, and mail something cool-looking to a few random accounts at the company. If you run the attachment, it pops up a simple message on your screen informing you that if this had been real, you'd just have cost everyone in the company a day's work/sent abusive mail to your most profitable client/whatever. This isn't publicly embarassing, and it makes the point. It's certainly proven very successful in a couple of cases I know of.
You could complement that with a "three strikes" sort of rule. Anyone who falls for it gets a couple more spams shortly thereafter. Anyone who falls for it repeatedly has maximum security settings imposed on their machine thereafter. It will cause them hassle if, for example, they have to send or receive a genuine executable attachment, but such is the price you pay for keeping your systems secure from your own users as well as people outside. Better that than watching offensive mail go to those top five clients...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
This virus wasted about 5 minutes of my time. I read an article about what it did, then the next day I deleted about 150 copies of this that got quarantined on our company's Exchange server.
, ht a,inf,ins,isp,js,jse,lnk,mdb,mde,msc,msi,msp,mst,p cd,pif,reg,scr,sct,shs,url,vb,vbe,vbs,wsc,wsf,wsh
:)
I use a virus scanner on the Exchange server capable of blocking attachments based on extension (Scanmail by TrendMicro works nicely for me). I always block:
ade,adp,asx,bas,bat,chm,cmd,com,cpl,crt,exe,hlp
Bingo - no e-mail virus problems
I figure if my users really need them and the person sending the message is smart enough (and meant to send it) then they can zip it. If the sender wasn't smart enough to zip it, then I can always pull it out of the quarantine folder.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
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$US fine. That was the most hellish time of my entire life and could have ruined my career forever. All over a tiny little deal (no damage was done).
Imagine what these kids would get in the US for writing such a worm. It'd be a helluva lot worse than 5 years in prison. So put your pro-punishment attitudes away and get real. Remember what our government does to computer criminals.
Why bother.
I guess you think the architects should have been held accountable for the twin towers not withstanding a plane hitting them. I hate M$'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.
Sound waves should be free!
Hey Kids! It's cool to be a skr1pt k1dd13! Just like your uncle Bob says: worms are good, worms are great, write a worm and masturbate!
That should make it uncool enough.
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.
any person IN THE COMPANY who sends an attachment to another person in the company that's rejected by the mail server because the recipient hadn't filled in the form has his or her email account locked for 24 hours to stop the virus from spreading.
Well, I know that if I told Stan from accounting I was going to send him a file, and in his normal scatterbrain manner, completely forgot about it, and subsequently had the attachment bounced and my account locked, Stan from accounting would lose his legs. But otherwise, this plan is good, if a little draconian. Maybe just filters against certain executable file types would be a better idea.
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.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I believe these kids are guilty of hate crimes against stupid people.
--Mizerai
For the kid who DoSed yahoo and cnn a while back. They put him a government reform school for 8 months.
.doc files were not executable.)
.doc, .vbs, or .exe onto the network.
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
A better solution is to not allow executable attachments which end in
An even better solution is for Microsoft to fix their programs or for people to not use Microsoft products.
There is a nice procmail filter (ftp://ftp.rubyriver.com/pub/jhardin/antispam/proc mail-security.html) that renames incoming attachments and makes them non-double clickable as well as pseudo scans office dcuments for dangerous macros.
The extra level of 'abstraction' (the user having to rename the file to run it) has saved us from every major email born virus in the past two years while still allowing people to get there precious attachments if they are expecting them.
--"Karma is justice without the satisfaction"
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.)
According to Symantec.com, it was Visual Basic.
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These virus writers are doing a public service. Serious problems with our communications infrastructure might not be fixed if it weren't for them.
Imagine what could happen if the first exploits of these security flaws came, not piecemeal from a scattering of amateurs, but rather from some adversary who could call on the services of numbers of technically proficient individuals. A hostile government say, or a terrorist movement that drew in disaffected persons in many countries. What if the vast majority of business users had no idea of how vulnerable they were until the system suffered a massive failure?
There is an enormous learning process going. People are finding out the hard way, what they would never otherwise have the time to focus on: computers can fail, for very subtle reasons, and we are more dependent on them every day.
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We run Sophos antivirus on the mail gateway. Sure it doesn't stop them all, but most anything that is a single click fatality is screened out. It happily killed all 120+ attempts of the Goner-A worm to arrive on one of my customer service rep's desktops.
I really have little sympathy for IT admins who get killed by this stuff, there are a million tools out there to stop this stuff from doing damage way before idiot humans get their hands on it.
I personally would like to see more ISPs use this stuff, after all they're not obliged to carry any traffic they deem high risk to their users. They already block dodgy ports so windows shares aren't wide open, why not a complimentary virus scan on mail?
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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 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.
The new US Patriot Act (HR 3162) makes creating and spreading virus and worms an act of terrorism. As such King George must require extradition of the offending youths and hold a military tribulan. If israel refuses to give up these kids, then we must bomb Israel at a cost of $1 billion dollars per month to US taxpayers as punishment for harboring terrorists. We must make sure to hit any buildings with big red crosses on them and then deny it. We must kill many civilians and deny it and when US soldiers get killed, we muist blame it on friendly fire.
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
Agreed, there should be absolutely NO REASON why a block of text and/or data sent to your machine should do anything you don't want it to. Since it does, and since these viruses get written over and over again, with no end in sight, the blame is with the software writers.
Now I'm not saying these kids should be let off the hook. They did something that was wrong and costly. But if we don't want to have this happen again, punishing the kids accomplishes nothing. Actually it makes the future virus writers want to learn how to be more stealthy.
The solution is sandboxes or code-checking with proofs. Or better yet, just displaying email messages as TEXT-ONLY, like they're supposed to be.