New Microsoft Worm Coming Soon?

Seft sent in a solid article running on the BBC discussing the next potential worm explosion on the heels of a recent Security Bulletin from Microsoft. The article is a somewhat general topic piece on worms in general.

Comments

Re:The Amazing Flying Hackers of China!

[caluml]

To be honest, I hope it just trashes boot sectors before writing random crap all over the hard drive. That might actually get the message through. All these soft viruses just make people think of it as an inconvenience. When something bad happens, people might just start sitting up and taking notice.

Mod me down, troll/flamebait, I know.
However, mod me up if you feel that this might make people start patching their systems.

Re:The Amazing Flying Hackers of China!

[IM6100]

A worm/virus that trashes it's host doesn't do a good job of propagating. These sorts of programs can do so at a 'time bomb' setpoint, if the designer feels the virus/worm will have propagated widely by that time, of course.

Mod the college student down...

[toupsie]

Well, if the only thing you are doing is running AIM, IE and Kazaa, I would agree. However if you work in an environment with mission critical apps that cannot fail, you can't just simply "patch your systems". You must test, test and retest.

Start thinking of us that operate in the real world. Cocky statements like "We've had plenty of warning about this, so it's only the criminally unprepared that will be hit right" sound outright stupid. The patch was released last Wednesday. To coordinate business departments, users and techincal staff along with testing requirements doesn't happen overnight. You do your best to patch as fast as possible and take steps to add a firewall layer but you have to deal with business requirements. Switching from Microsoft won't solve this problem either....OpenSSH anyone?

However, I don't mind Microsoft security problems, it keeps food on my table.

Re:OT: Unofficial Hostility in "Cyber Space"

[4of12]

constantly improving

Over the long haul, yes.

But there were some points of tension when the U.S. cruddy intelligence led to the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and when a U.S. spyplane flying off the coast made an emergency landing on a Chinese island.

Meanwhile, the government there is learning that it can divert attention from inconvenient issues (like corruption between the military and industry, lack of an open democratic process) by exploiting nationalistic sentiment (We vs They).

This is in the same grand tradition that is done in the United States and in Russia, so the rest of the world can feel safe knowing that all 3 of the largest nuclear superpowers are populated by emotional peasants.