Slashdot Mirror
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?""
...this was posted some days ago, I'm just too lazy to go find the link.
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
It could also submit every computer it couldn't infect as containing something of interest to the slashdot community. Who needs a ddos attack?
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
The Slashdot community may be faced with the "Curious Yellow Post" that may take over all other slashdot news in just a few days...
If anyone attempts to post other news it will immediately be taken off the site and replaced by a link to the "Curious Yellow Post"...
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
of this article.
Then I guess there's nothing we can do. The Internet is doomed.
... after I get a new Passport ID, that is.
Still, I know I'll be able to read about the new one on MSNBC.newtld a day or two afterwards
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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?
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,
Bowie J. Poag
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
Come on Pinky, let's prepare for tomorrow evening.
Why Brain? What are we going to do tomorrow evening?
Same as every evening, we try to take over the Internet!
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Reading this the idea that it could use distributed communication to monitor and control the infection rate triggered the term "Distributed Computing" in my mind. The amount of processing power that could be harnessed by such a worm is tremendous. Even if the worm used a small fraction of procession time from a large infected base population its power would probably be enough to do some good calculations quickly. I don't think the algorithms are ready yet, but imagine if you can use this worm to distribute a distributed AI. Combine this with the concept of virus polymorphism, and you have a virus that could stay alive, possibly undetected in the open, and do some interesting stuff. Maybe I've been reading too much sci-fi (Ender's Game) but couldn't these concepts, which are now very real, be used to create an internet life form if you will. Anyway, I don't claim to be an expert on anything I just talked about but I wanted to get the idea out into the open.
-sonic
Anti-virus companies Norton and Sophos today announced they had spotted a new virus in the wild. According to anti-virus experts a new virus known only as "Curious Yellow" has been attacking the popular Slashdot.org site.
The site has already been hit twice, with a story appearing on their main 'articles' section. The virus has been spoofing known slashdot editors such as 'Hemos' and 'michael'. The site has yet to comment on these attacks, but have warned there is a risk that further variants may attack their 'slashback' section later this week.
So far there is no known cure for this virus.
insignificant sig
Little. Yellow. Different.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Yes, something funny is definitely going on right now on the net. These statistics are solid and based on 4 years of data going back to 1998: my firewall has detected on average 1 probe every 3 hours.
On 28th September this year I made the mistake of visiting the website of Taiwanese motherboard maker QDI Group website to download a newer BIOS. Literally within seconds my firewall started getting hit by netbios probes. It's been about two probes a minute all day every day from sites all over the world since 28th September. That's a 400-fold increase! It's getting worse. They're from all over the place but always TCP to netbios port 137.
Does anyone else want to try vsiiting www.qdigrp.com?? Has anyone else seen the same pattern? I'll post a few of the IPs here. Maybe someone will recognise them.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I would be more worried if the worm ran around breaking things and choking children, like
furious yellow.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson