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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. "
Thats one hell of a virus.
I suggest all Windows users go to http://www.knoppix.net/ and burn the CD.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
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.
At work, they have duped over 5 of my collegues...even AFTER the email went out saying that it was going around. Well, Make an OS that any idiot can use, and only idiots will use it, I guess...
My problem with all these worms is that it doesn't do anything after it propogates, so no one will really care except bandwidth-concious IT people. It should send itself out, then erase all the FAT tables on a hard drive.
Or deltree the c:\winnt or c:\windows directory (or both).
That would REALLY piss people off, who would demand that they do something to make sure that not happen again...like...I dunno...Linux or OSX?
Just a thought...
The fake update has made it to Windows Update itself. Here is the name: "Recommended Update for Windows Rights Management client 1.0."
Do not download, it's only there to own your system.
I was happy to get this e-mail from Microsoft so I could apply a cumulative patch. I'm usually so bad about patching my system in time, but this time they took the trouble to remind me personally!
No more worries for me!
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
Network Assocaites has some screenshots of the installer http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_100662.htm
It's a very good idea these days to just reject all executable attachments at "the gates" so to speak. I use postfix 1.1 so I added:
/etc/main.cf where the file referenced came from here:
c ks
body_checks = pcre:/etc/postfix/mime_header_checks
to
http://www.securitysage.com/files/mime_header_che
but there are many regular expression filters like this one. Note, with 2.x you need to use the 'mime_header_checks' directive rather than 'body_checks'.
If you want to send someone an executable, send it to them in a zip or tar.gz.
No, it's not just you. Same here. Me too!!! I open every e-mail and run every attached executable, even if I don't know who it is from. And I've never had my computer affected with any virus or worm or trojan or whatever. Sure it crashes now and then, but all computers do, and sometimes I can't find my files... I probably didn't save them right in the first place or forgot where I put them. When it all gets really bad, the kid next door comes and fiddles with it, re-installs my system.. or something like that.. but that's just normal too.. windows has always been like this for me. And it's the best OS around, so thank god I don't have something worse.. like one of those hobby play operating systems!
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?
Greetings. You have been infected with GNU/Swen, a worm brought to you by members of the linux community. In order to get this worm to infect your system properly, you will need to use wget to download gnuswen-config-2.4.6 from one of the usual mirrors. Be careful; this version of the worm is not compatible with versions of gnuswen-config prior to 2.4.4. After you have downloaded the config tools and issued the usual incantations (./config, make, make install), you can configure the worm from any directory simply by typing sudo gnuswen-config -ort [your login id] [full path to your email client]. If you have any questions, be sure to RTFM, the docs are installed at /usr/share/info/gnuswen and all your config files are stored at ~/.gnuswen.
The other day I got a Linux email virus. It was this perfectly innocent looking message, with the subject line reading "Important!". So I opened it, and inside I found the following:
"This is an email virus for Linux users. It works on the honor system. Upon receipt of this message, you should manually forward it to everyone in your address book, then login as root and randomly delete a bunch of files. Thank you!"
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem