Slashdot Mirror
"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.
Seriously, I was working on removing blaster from my friends computer less than an hour ago.
I don't get this shit on my computer because I use a firewall and PC-Cillin updates daily. It's a shame because as linux becomes popular, viruses will exist for it too. True, they may not exploit holes known publicly for months, but they'll still exist.
Stanford's week just got a bit tougher, I'm afraid.
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
Watch me take a karma hit for this, but:
How many times do you Linux lusers have to be told that we don't want to use linux. (Note, this argument is based mostly towards linux lusers who think everyone should switch to linux. Macs are ok, but still suffer these problems to a lesser degree)
There are many GOOD reasons to run windows, including:
1) Good computer game support. Not only are most games windows based, but the API's for games in windows are well defined and provide good performance.
2) Good software support. Many windows programs are just faster, smoother, and better then their linux counterparts. Linux is about as good (sometimes better too) in terms of web browers/email programs, and other net software, but almost always falls flat in other areas.
3) It just works. I don't need to fuck around with shit too often to get windows to work with most of my programs. There is the occasional stupid program/setting, but that occurs on linux much more regularly. With linux too, I have found the supposedly easy to setup linux distributions are fragile and far too easy to break. The auto-config tools ussually only barely work, are ussually slow as snot, and are annoying.
4) Eventually, if everyone moves to linux, we will have the same problems as windows users wrt worms and viruses. There have been many many holes and exploits found in linux software, and with viruses only coming out days after an exploit is announced, no-one is really that safe that they can be smug about it.
A lot of programs/routines in linux will have to be refined if there is any chance of linux become a usable desktop operating system.