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Feds Working to Stop Worms
mbenzi writes "This article from GovExec describes how the feds worked to prevent a worm that could have been orders of magnitude worse than Code Red. Short on details, but an interesting timeline."
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I'm glad I can now walk through the desert without the sand worms attacking.
thanks government!
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
With a gang of zombies at his command, the creator of a superworm could mob a Web site or computer system, flooding it with bogus electronic transmissions until it drowned in the data torrent.
Tens of thousands of computers containing now-dormant Leaves worms await instructions from their master. Should they ever again awaken, a posse will be waiting.
With writing like this it sounds like someone trying to scare up funds to keep this department up and running.
"some of the most brilliant hackers in the world"?
SInce when are Skript Kiddeez brilliant hackers?
This article is stupefyingly filled with crap.. the whole alliterative narrative to make a "worm" into something more than a program is scary. "Clones" rather than "copies" "larva" rather than "small". "zombies" "Slither" "poisonous venom".
Ye ghods.. is this a tech article, or color text for a M:TG card?
maeryk
Feminine Protection? What is that? A chartreuse flame thrower?
Is this the first draft of the new Michael Crichton novel?
I found the plot rather thin, the characters unbelievably one-dimensional, and the ending was far to pat and convenient to believe.
Actually, it reads like most of his novels.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
In all seriousness I don't understand how they can tell if a worm was "more serious" than code red. The best thing about most worms is that most of them are "so wonderful" that they leave out a few details and never make it anywhere but the authors test system.
It's not worms I'm afraid of, it's next gen virii. With problem solving and logic bots that use AI it's just a matter of time before you train a program to do malicious things and give it multiple ways of accomplishing one goal of infection with a prime directive of selfpreservation, that would be the 'ultimate' worm.
We've all seen the AI programs ability to play chess, and that is impressive all in itself, can you imagine the same type of system loaded with every exploit ever documented, and then the ability to gain access via that list? Or imagine if somehow the program were able to recieve the notices of bugs (Cert, bugtraq, errata, and MS) and then learn of new potentially unpatched systems.
The problem would be not implementing the worm, nor stopping, but finding a reason for it's existence. Would it be used as a proof-of-concept only to be more horribly enacted in version 2? Would it be used for a massive DDoS attack on key internet systems thus disabling the net for a small amount of time? Or would the system dump all valueable information on a centralized server and then essentially commit suicide?
The only problem is how could this bug be 'harmful' to a host system if the prime directive was self perseverance? It's a little bit too deep of thinking for a friday morning, but we have yet to see what virii are actually capable of.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Why are we paying to have the government fix Microsoft's bugs?
they call it Pepsi Blue.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Is is me or does this article read like the cross between a propaganda article, a typical narrative from a Batman TV episode ("Will our heros be able to complete the task? Stay Tuned Bat-Fans!!!"), and a recruitment Ad for the FBI, CIA, or any of the Armed forces?
Dolemite
Save the World! Use a Quote!
Ye gads that was horrible. This has to be my favorite bit of hyperbole:
Worms were the most vicious new beasts to stalk the Internet.
I think Morris would have a few words of disagreement about that.
So, we have a section: Early July.
Then the next section: Second Week of July which starts
Weeks passed.
And, to top it all off we go over to McAfee and search and get the following:
Search Results
We found no records matching the following criteria:
Virus name containing "leaves".
This has to be BS of the first and worst order.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
So the best government executives in the USA act like secret agents in cheap pulp detective novels?
Perhaps they should try:
a) alterting businesses and organisations that have vulnerable systems.
c) naming and shaming software manufacturers with poor security processes.
But I guess fighting faceless villans with wicked plots to destroy the world is a lot more fun.
It's not quite as exciting when you realise that most of the villans are actually just naughty children.
that the old X-files writers are getting some work.
I found Steve Gibson's description of battling a DDoS attack having more technical information, and being much more entertaining at the same time. He's the author of "Shields UP!!" and other Internet security software. A good read for geeks.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Wow, this article's one juicy bunch of overwrought scare-mongering! It makes "Mr. Leaves" out to be some sort of James Bond super-villain, and then goes on to say "leaves" still took a back-seat to Code Red.
Once you peel back all the hyperbolistic prose, "leaves" seems to be just another run-of-the-IRC zombie that exploits PC already infected with Sub7. Numbers from the article itself show that it had nowhere near the infection rate or virulence of Code Red. The strange bit is at the end they imply, once the guy was caught, they just left the zombies out there rather than alert the owners of the infected PCs!? Odd that, wonder what the gov wants with all those waiting worms...