W32.Sobig.E@mm Worm Spreading Rapidly

mabu writes "Apparently there is another worm spreading online. Symantec has upgraded its severity to 'category 3.' This worm appears to primarily affect Microsoft systems, has an expiration date of July 14th, and searches users' machines for select files containing e-mail addresses that it uses to propagate itself."

Comments

Re:The Mysterious Third Force

[janda]

Let's see, there's the CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security (or whatever they're called this week), the NSA, and pretty much every other "agency" under Czar Bush.

Then throw in what's left of the KGB, the Chinese KGB, the Kinesset and the rest of our "allies", who caught Czar Bush spying on them during the vote for the Iraqi War For Oil^H^H^H^H^H^Hn Terrorism, "US Threat O' The Week", and everybody else.

Oh, and let's not forget the writers of spam protection software, who now get to do the "Buy Our Product[tm] And Protect Your System" speil.

Is that enough? If not, consider the insane antics of SCO. I can just imagine them trying to claim they're only protecting their IP or something.

With a system like the internet you can't really "take it over". However, there are times and places where strikes can be very effective in allowing you to take over specific systems. For an interesting (in my opinion) story on this, see the sci-fi story "Marooned in RealTime" by none other than Vernor Vinge. I prefer the duology, "Across RealTime", which has both "The Peace War", and "Marooned in RealTime" in it.

Since you said you were asking a serious question, I won't do the obligitory "beowoulf" joke here, but think about it. If you're trying to keep mail services, network traffic, and all the related things (AUTH? INFO?) up during one of these things, the odds of you detecting a small attack against one or two servers using a new vulnerability in something like FTP (or God[d][ess][ess] forbid, SSH or something) goes way down.

Which leads me to another thing, calling it "Secure Shell". Zimmerman had the right idea in calling it "Pretty Good Privacy", not "Unbroken Privacy" or something similar. The social engineering mechanics between the two products are very interesting.

Re:They don't make em like they used to

[Sobrique]

If you're keen to increase performance on your linux system, then in kernel revisions 2.2 and higher there's an optional performance boost. Basically, what it does is re-optimise the memory for application usage, which provides about a 5-10% performance boost.
It's quiet easy to enable, all you need to do is add "exec true" to your system profile (/etc/profile). It can be enabled at a user level by adding this line to a '.bashrc' or similar, but obviously, that will only enhance programs spawned after the shell, not system applications.

Re:They don't make em like they used to

[slaker]

France has a historic interest in the Congo.
US troops are probably just as needed in Liberia, an African nation that is historically close to the US.

I think the US doesn't have troops in Africa because of the Somolia fiasco. And of course the fact that it's a lot easier to sell "humanitarian intervention" when a country has stuff that we want.

Microsoft pulls plug on `NT4' Operating System ...

[terbo]

As Sobig Worm Spreads Rapidly ...

Goto sleep man.