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"Witty" Worm Wrecks Computers

Posted by timothy on 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.

4 of 587 comments (clear)

  1. Back in my day... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting


    Worms and Viruses caused DATA LOSS!

    It's nice to see a worm that actually damages your disk once again. Perhaps people will begin to see them as more than a nuiscance.

  2. Re:Liability? by wo1verin3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was just thinking about this, can the company be held liable for their software allowing others to basically destroy all data on the computer?

    Then I got to thinking, what about Microsoft whose os's and products who have cost millions and millions of dollars.... while some of them require user interaction, others have effectively shutdown the internet for wide areas for short periods of the time.. remember the sql one? :)

  3. Worthless govt agency by EvilStein · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's a weekend, why should they care about putting out their timely alerts, eh?

    "Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of the government's cybersecurity efforts, were unavailable for comment."

  4. IT WAS YOU!!! by gbrayut · · Score: 5, Interesting
    from washington post article:
    The Witty worm gets its moniker from a message buried within its code that says: "insert witty message here." That comes just before the code that overwrites the infected hard drives.