MyDoom Windows Worm DDoSing SCO

We mentioned the myDoom Worm just a few hours ago, but more information is available now, mainly that its ultimate goal is apparently to DDoS SCO. You can see some more detail at NetCraft. Obviously SCO has a lot of enemies out there right now, but it's always sad to watch someone stoop to this level.

Comments

This stinks - easy PR for SCO

[Captain Kirk]

Within a week, Darl will be equating Linux developers with virus writers - "both are called hackers and both hate me" he'll say and some 'respectable' journalists will report it as true.

Damn those ignorant anti-virus idiots!

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS, if you know that a worm forges the sender address, DON'T send bounces to that address. Worms are relatively easy to filter, but the crap from the virus-scanners comes in seemingly endless variations. Some even have the nerve to advertise their anti-virus solution, followed by a copy of the worm-mail, binary attachment included. Yeah right, moron, you just sent a copy of the worm to me and you expect me to buy your anti-virus product???

Re:Something Doesn't Add Up

[T-Punkt]

I asked that myself.

Could be some PCs with badly set clocks. Well, you know those windows users, they don't set their system clocks, have 00:00 blinking on their VCRs, use outlook and click on every fscking single attachements that made it into their mailbox.

This injures our reps, not SCO's

[Artifex]

SCO's Information Ministry can just point to this and claim more evil Linux users are trying to destroy the software business, etc.

We're right, and we know it. No self-respecting geek would stoop to participating in a DDOS in general, not to mention one against someone/something we consider to be morally bankrupt. We know that we can only claim the moral high road only if we actually stick to the high road... right?

It would be really interesting to find out if it's just some kids behind it, who aren't aware of the difference between right and wrong, or whether it's an entity who has a vested interest in making us look bad...

Re:Something Doesn't Add Up

[crawling_chaos]

I got into the office this morning to find 550 unread messages, mostly copies of this, or messages saying that copies I had supposedly sent hadn't been delivered.

Preach on, brother. I wish some sysadmins would get a clue and realize that with viruses spoofing the From: address, there is no fscking point in sending the "you sent me a virus" panic mail. All it does is bother the wrong people.

Re:But, damn it!

[gaijin99]

This is going to be a serious blow to the moral credibility of the OSS community, not just Linux users.

It is only a threat to our credibility if we allow it to be. I'm *REALLY* not trying to derail into an abortion debate here, but its the best example I can think of. The anti-abortion movement, in general, doesn't support clinic bombers and assissins; but clinics still get bombed and doctors still get murdered. So far the anti-abortion movement has quite successfully managed to avoid the actions of this group becoming a blow to their own moral credibility.

I'd recommend that we on the side of Free Software study the anti-abortion tactics with dealing with such incidents. The first, and most obvious step, is one that was taken last time: immediate and honest sounding disavowel of the actions of the DOSer. Its going to get old for RMS, ESR, Linus, Perens, etc continuously getting out and saying the same thing ("We don't support this, its wrong. We're still right, but the virus writers aren't with us, etc, etc, etc"), but it needs to happen.

I honestly don't know what the other successfull tactics are. I need to study how the respectable majority in the anti-abortion movement deals with its nutbags. Can anyone think of other movements with similar problems that we should look into?

Re:This is not one of SCO's enemies...

[pjrc]

This is someone who just wants to feel important and who thinks that by DDoS'ing SCO everyone will call him a hero.

Or someone who doesn't give a damn about SCO, and merely wants to distract attention away from their real goal of turning millions of end-user PCs into zombies to do their future bidding.

Hmmm... who would be interested in that <cough> spammers <cough> and has an established history of it?

You guys are amazing...

[tbase]

I'm speaking of all of you who are saying SCO deserves it (and only those people). Do I deserve to deal with this virus BS? I have enough trouble dealing with the spam at my company, now I have to deal with this too. Viruses suck, period. Especially this one, which is forging random "from" addresses. It seems to be using #randomfirstname#@domain.extention - so now on top of the dozen or so viruses an hour I'm getting, I'm also getting bounces that I can't filter because the "to" is random. Don't bother telling me to filter out executables, I already do that. As a matter of policy, I'm the one that checks the filtered "junk" to make sure there were no false positives. It's usually about 500 a day, 1200 over the weekend. Also don't bother telling me to bounce undefined addresses. Not an option. Considering how early in the game it is for this virus, the dozen or more an hour I'm getting will probably turn into a lot more. Whoever put this out there is doing far more damage to innocent bystanders than they can ever hope to do to SCO. SCO will hang themselves eventually - the author(s) of this virus is worse than anyone at SCO.

I do agree with those who are suspicious of the motives - I think the SCO attack is just a front to increase the spread. Some morons will undoubtedly put intentionally infected machines out there, which will be more effective as Spammer relays than as drones to attack SCO. Anyone intentionally letting a machine become infected should have the book thrown at them. It amazes me how stupid very intelligent people can be sometimes.