Symantec Claims They Knew About Slammer In Advance

truthsearch writes "Wired is reporting 'Symantec claims to have identified the Slammer worm that ravaged the Internet during the last weekend of January hours before anyone else did. Symantec then shared the information only with select customers, leaving the rest of the global community to get slapped around by Slammer.' I'm not bothered I didn't know Slammer was coming, but Symantec has a moral responsibility to inform the public if it thinks millions will be affected." It isn't clear to me how Symantec could know, hours in advance, about a worm which took ten minutes to spread throughout the entire Internet, unless they had something to do with its release. Update: 02/14 16:54 GMT by M : Wired has their math wrong; Symantec apparently had at most 20-30 minutes of early warning. Symantec claims in this press release that they discovered the worm "hours before it began rapidly propagating".

Comments

Perhaps a new time system needs to be set?

[josh crawley]

Well, we all see the wired articles about "KNOWING hours in advance". And of course that nice 3 hour discrepancy, oh wait! That's a timezone change.

I could go on to flame Wired, or even Symantec but I wont. Instead I use a system called .beats whenever I talk to friends over the net (in other countries). The .beat system is based on Greenwich time (+0). The day is then subdivided into 1000 sections. According to the math, 1 beat is 86.4 seconds. In this setup, it doesnt matter where you're at. The .beat is exactly the same for any timezone.

In this case, all times are equal (well, the fact the .beat was created as Internet Time helps). Here's some links to the @beat system:

CNN story
Some crazy guy who does lots with time

Re:So?

[workindev]

Can you please explain how turning a $600k investment in the Texas Rangers into $15 Million is a failure?