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

we are just lucky...

[Lumpy]

These worm and virii writers are pretty harmless... If they were really malicious we would have seen Nimbda doing things like delete *.doc *.xls or format the hard drive.

A very scary worm would simply spread it's self quietly and slowly, wait for a doomsday time to tick and then Boom... simply start a massive delete fest on the computers or to be even more sinister start changing numbers randomly in spreadsheets and documents... like simply adjusting up or down by a random amount.

Once a virus or worm has admin control or system control it can do anything and luckily we still havent had one of these buggers do any destructive things...

I am expecting it though... It's just like guns... most of the planet can safely own and use them and only a few lunatics start blowing people's heads off.