Slashdot Mirror
Virus Creators Sharing More Code
arpy writes "The Washington Times is carrying a report on a 5% increase in publicly available virus code in 2003 (based on a Symantec report). There are now about seven versions of MyDoom, and at least 14 each of Netsky and Beagle. Explains why my email account is overloaded with these little bastards. PC World is reporting changes in the countries that virus are originating from: Australia shot from 14th place to 5th over the last six months of 2003! The source of these stories seems to be the March 2004 Symantec Internet Security Threat Report." (This last requires registration to download.)
Blaster did that. Well, just that one RPC patch. Of course, it did it poorly, by trying to download the patch at full speed so it clogged up everyone's networks.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
more viruses, more problems
... or at least a large part of it.
I guess none of the virus kiddies know that the bandwitdth consumed by the worms is a large part of the problem they cause--not very many worms have even had destructive payloads* and we've still gotten hammered by them.
Of course, apparently no one else reads all those widely available reports on damage caused by the worms (securityfocus.com, incidents.org, slashdot, etc. etc. etc. have reported on such things).
(*Well, that depends on whether you consider the common payload of trojans 'destructive', they don't destroy any files directly, so I'm not classifying them as such, but they're not exactly benign...)