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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.

2 of 587 comments (clear)

  1. Infection by CGP314 · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    "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

  2. Incorrect on point 4. by khasim · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    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.