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

Come on...

[Doctor O]

...this was posted some days ago, I'm just too lazy to go find the link.

Doomsday scenario?

[Mika_Lindman]

The "doomsday scenario" frightens "even us", says Dornseif.

Doomsday? Hey guys, it's the internet! Who's gonna die if the internet shuts down? Come on now, it's not like the next ice age or nuclear war! 99% of worlds population won't give a shit if the internet shuts down for a few days. Who cares if a bunch of nerds freak out 'cause they can't read their emails?

The main question is, are YOU so addicted to the net, that you would use the term "doomsday", if it shuts down?

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[Shalome]

You apparently have no idea what the actual scope of the internet covers. Corporate and military communications, banking transactions, medical information tracking, etc, etc. Yes, we could live without the internet, but reverting to the "old fashioned" pen-and-paper snailmail transportation of information, even for short periods of time, could cost billions of dollars -- not to mention levels of annoyance it would cause in day-to-day life.

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet has already shut down in some ways. One way in particular are all forms of posted discussions that involve many people. Conversations fall into useless patterns. Some sort of artifact of our minds causing us to talk in endless loops when a large enough pool is reached. Mindless and numbing repetition. Not meant as a slight against /. but an observation from usenet, mailing lists, everything. flamewars, holy wars, and a million different and more subtle species of mindless reptitive behavior.

It's like watching the same pieces fall from some pavlonian machine over and over again. One comment brings forth a slew of responses, all providing an identical response. In Usenet, it's horrible.

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[Zocalo]

Quite. There seem to be quite a few people out yelling about the "death of the Internet", much like people used to go around with sandwich boards with "The end of the world is nigh!" written on them. Perhaps they should take a few minutes and go read this rather excellent article at the Register and get a dose of reality. And after that, perhaps a re-reading of "Chicken Little" just to hammer the point home.

Re:Doomsday scenario?

[david duncan scott]

The Internet (or more properly speaking, Arpanet) was created as an experiment with DoD funding. The experiment was, in Defense terms, not particularly successful, and they moved on to other ways of getting their job done, leaving the Internet to academics and, well, fools and poltroons like us.

Did you really think that the Pentagon was letting us all play on their wires? This isn't War Games, and the military planners aren't brain-dead.

Mmkay... Call me stupid, but..

[Bowie J. Poag]

If you really think about it, the math behind such an event may not work out....My guess is, there simply aren't enough hosts on the net that are simultaneously A) succeptible to infection B) sitting on static IPs, and C) unmonitored by human eyes. All three conditions must exist in order for the worm to propogate -- If any one of those factors is absent, that particular thread of the superworm is halted. It makes the scenario described in this article practically impossible. Sure, a superworm may exist, but it would be so slow-moving and predictable that it would be no more a threat than any other form of DoS attack.

If you really want something abstract to think about, consider this: How is this "superworm" different than, say, a non-existant website mentioned on a nationwide TV broadcast? Instead of malicious code generating the resulting network congestion, its humans -- The net result is the same -- The effect will taper off as T increases. Nothing to really worry about, in other words.

Yeah, I know. I'm sure someones gonna come back and read this 10 years from now and want to slap me silly with a 10 lbs. trout, for my lack of forethought.. But seriously, I think these sort of stories are more along the lines of interesting fiction than they are real-world possibilities.

Cheers,

Re:Mmkay... Call me stupid, but..

[chrestomanci]

If you really think about it, the math behind such an event may not work out....My guess is, there simply aren't enough hosts on the net that are simultaneously A) susceptible to infection B) sitting on static IPs, and C) unmonitored by human eyes. All three conditions must exist in order for the worm to propagate -- If any one of those factors is absent, that particular thread of the superworm is halted. It makes the scenario described in this article practically impossible. Sure, a superworm may exist, but it would be so slow-moving and predictable that it would be no more a threat than any other form of DoS attack.

IMHO, there are plenty of susceptible computers out there.

Most internet servers, both large and small are on static IPs, and only subject to occasional human monitoring. (That is occasional, relative to this worm's speed of propagation, which is estimated to be under a minute).

I would include my home linux box in the category of susceptible computers. It is permanently connected (ADSL), on static IP, and I only use it every day or so. It it became infected with Curious Yellow, I would be unlikely to notice for 12 hours or so, (unless my ISP phoned me), and if the worm was stealthy enough not to monopolise any resource (CPU, disc, bandwidth etc), I might not notice for weeks until someone contacted me. Considering how infectious this hypothetical worm is, 12 hours would be enough to do huge damage.

Ask yourself if the same would apply to any permanently connected computers in your control?

As for "susceptible to infection". Curious Yellow would be designed to use some sort of zero day exploit, so we have no idea which computers are susceptible, and it would be complacent to assume that only windows boxes are. My system runs Debian Stable, and I regularly apply the security patches, but that does not make it completely invulnerable.

Don't be complacent, Treat the risk seriously.

Re:Mmkay... Call me stupid, but..

[JustKidding]

You may have noticed that the net has a lot of servers, like webservers, dns servers, proxies and such. Those are the kind of servers that are checked like, ones a week if they don't malfunction, are online 24/7, have a static ip, lots of bandwidth, and so much traffic that a little extra will go by unnoticed. Besides that, the ability to quickly propagate code patches would make it nearly impossible to install security patches on a system that is already infected.

There is little point in having the worms detect when to go into turbo mode, since such a command could be quickly relayed trought the network. And ofcourse there is a chance that some of the worms would switch to turbo mode prematurely, leading to early detection.

i find the idea of the worm spidering for new hosts rather interesting; obviously, it's a nearly ideal way to find other webservers. Also, since any host on the web has a reference to a dns server, it's very easy for any worm to find at least one of those. Once a dns server is compromised, the worm has a fairly complete and realtime list of webservers, with very few bad addresses. This way, many hosts may be infected with very little host- and portscanning.

If such a superworm would ever get out in the wild, it may be very hard or nearly impossible to stop it.

Re:Biological counterpart?

[indecision]

There's a (biological) virus to which humans are either immune, or not - just like any other virus.
The people who catch it, however, are turned into attack zombies primed to attack specifically the immune humans.

Many novels based on vampires or zombies have this idea.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson is a personal favourite.

Enjoy
indecision

Re:This is a repeat ...

[Naikrovek]

Agreed. This isn't a homegrown site anymore, they're paid for this.

Surely they can take the time to write a cross-checker to see if any of the links in the submissions have been used in any previous stories, after redirects.

Surely it can't be that hard...

Re:DELETE DOUBLE STORIES

[llin]

Ever get the feeling that the editors don't actually read the site? :)

Re:This is a repeat ...

[TheTomcat]

I find it ironic that there are at least SIX virtually identical (repetitive), upmodded comments about this being a repeat story.

Sad.

S