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"Witty" Worm Wrecks Computers
An anonymous reader writes "A new Internet worm wriggled across the entire Internet in the span of a few hours Saturday morning to all computers running several recent versions of firewall software from Internet Security Systems, including BlackICE and RealSecure, according to this story at Washingtonpost.com. The flaw that Witty exploited was discovered Wednesday by eEye Digital Security. The worm overwrites data on the first few sectors of the victim's hard drive, making the machine virtually ubootable and potentially destroying much - if not all - of the victim's data." Update: 03/21 02:18 GMT by T : Reader Jeff Horning points out that eEye actually disovered the worm on the 8th of March, and came up with a fix the next day.
How can we blame M$ for this?
Insert "witty" first post comment
Do you really expect us to believe more than ten people worldwide run Windows on their firewalls? ;-)
Copyright Violation:"theft, piracy"::Anti-Trust Violation:"thermonuclear price terrorism"<-Overly dramatic language.
FUCK!
I just now (10 min ago) plugged my laptop into my brand new DSL modem... Now I have to install the antivirus program before rebooting... Shit shit shit...
I propose we introduce the death penalty on the sick motherfucker who wrote this fucking piece of shit virus. FUCK!
(And no, I haven't watched any Tarantino films lately)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
Most infected computers will have to be rebuilt from scratch unless their owners instead decide to buy new ones
I didn't know worms were so powerful now that they could melt a computer into a pile of toxic sludge. : /
-Colin
People would be much better off with hardware versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook (Express) in that respect. Yikes.
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
"FGTRGDI" (Feels good to run gnu/linux doesent it?)
More cryptic acronyms to the people!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Now that you've got yourself a computer system at home, you'll want to protect it from the evils of the Internet. Because Operating Systems are chock full of holes just waiting to be exploited, you should, at a minimum, take the following steps... Step 1. Go out and buy a firewall product for your machine. Also pick up some virus protection software. Step 2. Ok, now install the firewall software... Oh......Damn It!
I should get to work on that. Yikes! ;-)
Newspapers, magazines, letters, and stamps.
How 1980s. Yikes.
My father is a blogger.
I'm sorry that you read so poorly. Here, let me help by quoting the relevant sentence for you:
h p
"all computers running several recent versions of firewall software from Internet Security Systems, including BlackICE and RealSecure,"
Google tells me Quantian is Knoppix/Debian.
http://www.iss.net/products_services/blackice.p
While there are RealSecure sensor nodes for Linux, the desktop software being referred to here is also a Windows product.
In other words, BZZZT! Thanks for playing the troll today.
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
Hey, serves these folks right! I mean who'd be stupid enough to have a Windows machine on the internet without any kind of firewa...
err, never mind.
I bet this worm was written by a disgruntled network administrator sick of those "I'm being attacked" emails.
> More cryptic acronyms to the people!
That's MCATTP around here, chum.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Blue screens and memory dumps are normal Windows behavior. Nothing to be worried about.
There were some really evil viruses back in the day. Fumble: This virus will generate typing errors, every now and then. That is, if you press the "R" key for example, it will occasionally insert another letter like "E" in the text instead. dBASE: The dBase virus is very rare, but rather curious. It is clearly intended to garble dBase files, or rather any file with a name that ends in .DBF.
.DBF file, it will garble all the outgoing data. However, when the data is read back later, the virus will correct the garbled data.
.DBF file that is more that three months old, the virus will try to destroy the FAT and root directory on drives D:, E: .... Z: There is a bug in the code, however, so the destruction will be rather unpredictable.
I have no idea why someone hasn't put an imaginatively evil payload in a modern virus.
If the virus is active in memory when a program writes to a
There is just one problem. If the virus is detected and removed, the data will be useless because the virus will not be present to "de-garble" it when it is read back.
There is a more harmful side to this virus. If an attempt is made to write to a
"Witty" Worm Wrecks Workstations!
Obviously you didn't read the article very well.
It says that you need to rebuild your machine from scratch or buy a whole new computer.
Yet, you're on /.
I wouldn't touch IE with a 10 foot piece of ethernet cable.
"Witty" Worm did not destroy your system.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
It must be nice having benevolent cracker reflash your BIOS for you.