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Microsoft "Swen" Worm Squiggles Into Sight
greenhide writes "As forecast in this story, a new Microsoft worm has indeed wriggled to the surface. The W32.Swen's claim to fame is its professional looking email advertisement that pretends to be a fake Microsoft patch. Earlier viruses have made the claim, but none of them looked this good. It appears to have infected over 1.5 million machines. "
After all these worms and virii are hitting MS boxen from every angle, there still aren't mentions of alternatives from major news sources. The Dallas Morning News, last week, had at least a causal glance by saying in one line "Macintosh users are unaffected".
Why isn't Linux and Macintosh turning this into a big propaganda opportunity? Both OS's can hold up the 'come to us, we've had our shots, we'll never get worms' flags and pray that the big media mentions it.
The virus needs user interaction to propagate. Hence it is an e-mail virus. Only programs that propagate automatically are worms. One cannot necessarily expect the Washington Post to get such technicalities right. However, it would be nice if at least /. used proper terminology.
/. we known anymore, would it...
Then again, if it did, it wouldn't be the
Hypothetical advertisement: "Hey, we're Macs, and we don't have viruses."
I guarantee you that every virus writer and his(/her?) grandmother would flock to OS X and start writing viruses with reckless abandon. Apple, Linux, Amiga, Commodore 64, and whatever other less-used operating system is probably perfectly happy to have its users sitting fat, dumb, and happy and not bragging about it.
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
I can't help but feel that people have accepted the fact that Computers in general get Viruses. People complain about Windows, but Windows, to most people, is the only solution. So for them, the concept that Windows gets hit with so many viruses means that users in general get hit. No matter the OS.
I was explaining the other day to one of my business partners not to install this virus, and to delete it right away if he gets it.
He asked me if my computer was infected, whereby I had to explain once again that running Linux, I generally don't have to worry about things like this.
But the point is, for him, computers just get viruses. And because of that, I believe that most people are thinking: "Hrm, my computer got a virus.", not "Windows let another Virus through."
So the majority of the people that aren't really computer illeterate (the majority), don't really know what to think when people tell them Linux is more secure.
Because for them, it's still running on their computer, and their 'computer' got a virus. It's just their mentality. Of course, this is simply my opinion.
Jason Lotito
You know that if the situation in Terminator 3 (virus spreads over majority of systems) were to ever happen, it would happen as a result of having a massively homogenous computing environment. I really think that we should stop teaching kids how to use Word and Excel in middle school, and start teaching them how to install their own linux systems. We could create an army of informed computer users, something that Microsoft fears the most.
The Ro Factor - Jeep/Linux Weblog
dude, that knoppix cd will be useful when the windows installation gets kicked up a notch, it's really handy to have a cd like that to retrieve the really imporant data out there.
it's also good enough to keep you on 'net while you're trying to figure out wtf went wrong.
unless you got an as good a windows running livecd system?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Oh no, this multi talented worm is:
But wait! Theres MORE! It has its own SMTP engine. It attempts to halt anti-virus processes. It alters the registry AND THEN it even disables the ability to edit the registry!
Quite a nasty beasty really. And even for us nice safe Linux/BSD users there are issues. Clogged mailboxes are at least, a nuisance, at worse, a huge bandwidth cost. Those on dialup or liimited broadband access where you pay for d/ls and uploads will notice it!
So even those of us cheerfully NOT patching frantically have consequences. The celebrations of yet another MS problem are a bit premature it seems to me. I'd rather see more outrage that such an inherently insecure and easily manipulated OS is costing ALL of us online.
Nothing - well thats something.
There are several reasons what you said was just plain wrong. There were a lot of ways to avoid the RPC (MSBlast) worm. First, you could have patched when the patch was first released. It pre-dated the worm by several weeks. Second, you could have been running the built-in XP firewall. Third, you could have been running a 3rd party software firewall such as ZoneAlarm. Fourth, you could have been behind a firewall on another box or behind a hardware firewall. Fith, you could be behind a NAT box that is set not to pass incoming connect attempts to LAN side (which is the default setting for the 3 home routers I have owned). Doing any one of these would have dropped the likelyhood of getting the RPC worm to zero or near to it (e.g. it's perfect until and infected machine is hooked up behind the firewall). How are people who took one or several of these steps lucky? I have 3 Win boxen among the computers on my home network, none got infected. Though my router was catching about 5-8 infection attempts a second.
If you were using XP and you didnt get infected by the RPC worm you were lucky. The only way you could defend against it is Zone Alarm.
Lucky? Zone Alarm?? Well, at least you were able to show that you really don't know much about Windows (or at least not as much as you think you do).
-- Kircle
W32.Swen is really aggrevating me over here. In the past few days I've received over 1000 copies. And I'm not terribly happy about it. I'm probably averaging at least 100 per hour during the day, and about 300 at night (when my primary e-mail system is offline).
The really irritating part? My _entire_ network consists of one OS/2 box (the e-mail client machine), and three Linux boxes. Not a single one can be infected by this virus, and not a single one could propogate it (unless I explicitly wanted to do so, which I don't).
Now thankfully I'm on a pretty decent cable modem service here (really good speed), bogofilter was quickly trained to detect and toss these messages into a SPAM folder (where they quickly get deleted), and my mail client (PMMail/2) has a remote control feature that allows me to scan message titles on the server and delete the messages without downloading them.
But still -- imagine if this weren't an immune OS/2 machine, but one of the Windows machines that could be infected. I could very well be propogating these as well. But because of my good choices in OS's, I don't.
Thus, I think I'm doing a public service by _not_ running Windows and propogating these viruses, but instead act as a sink to prevent them from propogating. My machine is the end-of-the-line for these viruses -- even though getting thousands of e-mail is highly annoying, my machine (in effect) "kills" the ones I receive, causing their propogation lines to end.
I think Windows users on the Internet owe those of us who run other operating systems, and they owe us big. They can start paying up by PROPERLY PATCHING THEIR SYSTEMS!!! (Stopping sending me $^&*%^&!! hundreds of copies of W32.Swen would be really helpful as well).
Yaz.
A lot of people wil blame it on "dumb" end-users. However, the scary thing is that just by an end-user clicking on the attachment in the email, they could hose their system. Even if an end user executed an attachement under Linux, it would only run as an that user, not Administrator or root. The worst that would happen is the users home directory being deleted. This is why MS Windows security is so bad IMO. Every user runs as Administrator out-of-the-box. This is the only reason ms windows is said to be "user friendly". Take a user out of Administrator mode and it is not any more user friendly then Linux. MS picked user friendly over security. Sure there are some tech savvy ms windows users that can secure their boxes much better then the masses. However, for the average user, MS gave them a friendlier environment to work in with no regards to the value of their data.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
No troll, I'm dead serious.
I wish people took more interest in the things that they use every day and take for granted. Everything is so completely fascinating. I think that there is no better pursuit in life than to learn the hell out of everything. The way people learn one thing and then get all arrogant about it is, in my opinion, the worst behavior of all.
There are tons of things that I don't know, I don't look down on people for not knowing things. It does bother me when they refuse to learn, though.
People do awful things to their computers and people do awful things to their cars (and their plumbing!). If people took a little more time to appreciate the things that they take for granted, many of our problems would be gone.
I didn't mean for this to end up all preachy, but I don't remember where I was going. If I hadn't already typed so damn much, I'd just quit now, but hell...
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If popularity is what makes Windows insecure, then why is IIS being hit many more times than Apache even while Apache runs 60% of the websites out there?
A well designed worm (or a virus for that matter) can pop up an important looking window saying something bad has happened on the system, please supply the root password to fix it. Haw many casual Linux users (if there are an?) do you think would fall for that? When you're running KDE or Gnome as a regular user, you'll get prompted for the root password when performing many system-type tasks. A smart worm could even wait for you to click on something before popping up, so that it doesn't appear as if it came out of nowhere.
No system is immune by design. Stupid or careless users are always crafty enough to bypass even the best security.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
That's true of any environment. If a windows computer uses IMAP and doesn't store the password locally it can't delete your mail either.
Who said you had to use the SMTP host on the network? Any old program that knows how can speak SMTP and mail itself out to the next victim. In fact from what the article says this virus knows how to speak SMTP. For an external MTA it's pretty hard for it to only accept SMTP sesions that use TLS as TLS is poorly supported across the internet. I know all my machines running an MTA don't have secure SMTP setup (I really don't like paying the $100 a year blood money to the damn certificate authorities).
I will agree that unix machines tend to be better administered, and are more likely to be patched better simply because the OS is less tied together and inter-dependant like windows is (and thus the huge service packs MS puts out). Take the latest openSSH patch for example. The changes were all back-ported to the version of OpenSSH running on a distribution+version. We also know exactly what changed (2 or 3 lines of code), and they're fairly simple changes. Vigourous testing of the patches isn't as pertinent as it is in the case of MS products, so patches will be applied more often.
AccountKiller
If you run a malicious attachment, it will be pretty much harmless to the machine. It may be able to wipe out your home directory, but that is about it.
/home is the most valuable part of the system! You can re-install Linux in under an hour, and recover /usr, /var, and pretty much everything else (with a slight exception of changed to /etc, but that's not important). If you lose /home, you are, simply put, FUCKED. Big time. Try reconstructing that data in under an hour. You can't. If you could back up *anything* on your system (assuming you had a choice), that choice should be /home.
That is the *biggest* crock of shit ever, but I hear it time and time again on Slashdot.
Why on earth would would you care if your applications got borked? It's the data that's important.
It's because it's too hard to get anything done on a Windows box as a normal user.
Btw, 'run-as' is little more than a half-assed ripoff of 'su'. Try to install a program sometime using 'run-as'. Whose permissions does the installer use? Where do the registry settings go? Why doesn't anything work?
I, and many others, are tired of fighting with half-completed MS 'features' that don't live up to the hype. Maybe, one day, Windows will have finally managed to implement all of the useful features that were designed into the UNIX and Mac OSes. Then I might consider using it. At MS' current rate of ignoring basic functionality in lieu of marketing buzzwords, though, that day will never come.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"