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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.
"With all these hard drive problems, the infection rates are going to shrink pretty quickly as all these affected machines grind themselves to a halt," Stewart said.
Well thanks Stewart. I'm glad to know I won't have to worry about the infection rate of AIDS once most people have AIDS.
-Colin
Just for fun and giggles, my submission
Blackice worm released Saturday March 20, @04:25PM Rejected
Maybe I didn't spice it up enough?
"How many times do you Linux lusers have to be told that we don't want to use linux."
That's ok, we enjoy being GODS among men...
1, 2 and 3 are okay. Subject to each person's experience.
4 is not. Worms and viruses and (to a lesser extent) trojans are NOT distributed equally based upon marketshare.
They propagate because of FLAWS in the SECURITY of the system. And Linux has a better security model than Windows.
Windows has the problems it does because:
#1. Microsoft puts software on the system that was not selected. Microsoft does this for a "user friendly" point. But "user friendly" does not equate to "good security".
#2. Microsoft enable services, by default, that are NOT needed. Again, this is for "user friendly" points. But it is bad for security.
#3. Microsoft made it easy to execute apps, even via email. They're finally learning on this one after wave after wave after wave of email trojans have hit their products. Again, this is from a "user friendly" point.
In order for Linux to have the same problems that Microsoft has, Linux would have to have 51% of the desktop, come installed with the same apps on 90% of those desktops AND have security holes in those apps AND be setup to run as root.
This is NOT just about who has more desktops.
For those that know a bit about viruses...
Are there viruses that can run on multiple operating systems? I'm talking about ONE virus that can infect a Windows machine, then propagate onto a linux machine and infect that, and so on. I'm also not talking about Internet Explorer exploits, or user exploit/trojan horse (eg. user clicks on some attached file),etc. I'm talking about an old school virus that can detect what OS is running and then infect it.
Anyone know of such viruses?
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places