"Witty" Worm Wrecks Computers

Posted by timothy on Saturday March 20, 2004 @12:57PM from the your-ruse-your-clever-trick dept.

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.

2 of 587 comments (clear)

Re:Stick to hardware routers and firewalls... by Frambooz · 2004-03-20 13:04 · Score: 5, Funny

"Although they ain't perfect, at least they're not running on your computer. Yikes."
People would be much better off with hardware versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook (Express) in that respect. Yikes.

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No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
This is a perfect time to promote the expression by Eudial · 2004-03-20 13:06 · Score: 5, Funny

"FGTRGDI" (Feels good to run gnu/linux doesent it?)

More cryptic acronyms to the people!

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GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!