Curious Yellow, Superworm

jpmccord writes "Brandon Wiley's white paper, Curious Yellow, explains how "a superworm -- a worm that coordinates it actions among infected hosts and launches a massive distributed denial of service attack on any hosts it can't infect using those it can" (via disLEXia, a weblog by Maximillian Dornseif). The "doomsday scenario" frightens "even us", says Dornseif. An accompanying discussion rebukes Wiley's article a bit. Aaron Swartz's light-hearted take is rather entertaining: "So go read it now and find out how you can take over the whole Internet. And if you're going to, could you give me 24 hours notice?""

Comments

This is a repeat ...

[sdr]

of this article.

Re:This is a repeat ...

[Fex303]

Er... not quite. The first half is, but in the second half of THIS story it talks about a more moderate viewpoint. Y'know, the bit that says:

"An accompanying discussion rebukes Wiley's article a bit. Aaron Swartz's light-hearted take is rather entertaining: "
So go read it now and find out how you can take over the whole Internet.

Let's not be too quick to jump on the "Repeat story!" bandwagon. I mean, it can't take that long to read the four sentence story can it?

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[RAMMS EIN]

``The main question is, are YOU so addicted to the net, that you would use the term "doomsday", if it shuts down?''
Yes. I depend on the Internet for news, entertainment, maintaining contacts with friends, and income. So what is left if that perishes?

So let me think of way to defend myself against this...write another worm that launches DDoS attacks against the hosts infected by Curious Yellow...worm wars!

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[Pike65]

Corporate and military communications, banking transactions, medical information tracking, etc, etc

Actually in the UK each regional Trust communicates using direct lines between centres. If you send medical details between Trusts, it's still done via paperwork.

They trust the Internet about as much as I do ; )