Netsky Worm Variant Attacks P2P Services

ee_moss points out this Washington Post article (via Yahoo!), excerpting "The latest variant of the Netsky worm directing infected computers to launch Web-based attacks against music- and file-trading Web services such as Kazaa, taking down at least one company's Web sites in the process. The worm, the 19th version of a bug that made its debut in February, is also targeting some Web sites that offer computer programs designed to illegally break or bypass copyright controls on software programs."

Comments

Human stupidity

[mindless4210]

The experts advised people not to click on strange attachments in e-mail, which can activate the worm...

Of course, until you can teach people to be intelligent, these types of viruses will continue to circulate through the net.

Re:Human stupidity

[Amiga Lover]

I think it's not always a matter of intelligence, but apathy. People get a virus and... ...so what? I've cleaned relatives machines with dozens of viruses. They kept working for the most part, they worked before and they worked afterwards. A few resources were consumed, but consumer machines now are in the multi GHz speed range. Most viruses just don't affect the user enough for them to really give a shit about them. For an example, when mydoom hit so massively earlier this year it... made their machine one of hundreds of thousands targeting sco.com.

Again, apathetic users, they don't notice and don't care. Until a virus comes along with the spreading power of mydoom, but sits and waits for a couple of weeks until it throws up gay porn onscreen and shouts out "HEY EVERYONE I'M WATCHING GAY PORN" while proceeding to delete EVERY SINGLE DAMNED FILE USERS HAVE... they're going to keep on not giving a damn about viruses.

The general public sees viruses as something computers just get, and is as innocuous as a sniffle. If a few viruses came along and did the equivalent of schizophrenia, lung cancer and whole body pus filled sores to their computer, THEN they will take notice.

Re:It's not that surprising . . .

[Bz3rk]

OK put on your tin foil hats... the conspiracy theory is that these worms that target P2P are produced by or for the RIAA. They already flood the networks with fake or corrupt files, why wouldn't they take this next step? They have already shown they have no respect for the law anyway.

Netsky

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

I don't really understand this virus, or more precisely, the people who wrote it. Although I can not speak from experience, I would have to imagine that spreading virii over P2P networks is like shooting fish in a barrel (hotpr0n.mpg.exe would probably take down half the computers on kazaa). So why are they trying to spread it through e-mail? I would think that since there is no challenge involved in spreading it that they would be moralists (like the people who disguise a program that reports people's ip address as warez) but they are not doing it over the networks themselves so they would have a potential for "collateral damage". Is the writer just a random skript kiddie or am I missing something?

Re:It's not that surprising . . .

[Marvelicious]

I have been wondering this for years myself! Why don't more people run antivirus programs? www.grisoft.com has a free version of avg antivirus. Free! I figure, if you use the internet, you have no good excuse not to use one! Did I mention its free. Granted, its a little clumsy and short on features, but it seems to work!

New Virus Avenues

[MrNonchalant]

It can't be long before e-mail becomes so suspect that self-mailing viruses simply won't spread because everybody is so afraid of their inbox. It will be interesting to see where viruses go then. IM would be my first bet, as well as P2P networks, vulnerabilities in certain *cough* OSes we've already seen, and network shares but there has got to be other methods I'm not thinking of. This could be really interesting to watch. I've never taken the hard line view towards viruses that I see here, I see them as massive experiments with data and as kind of a spectator sport. Of course that could be because I've never really had a problem with them...

Stop the presses

[shaitand]

Remember how quick the media was to turn on the linux community when a worm appeared to be targeted at SCO.

Let's show we are a couple notches above the media here and give this some time, maybe we can take this thing apart and make sure of it's TRUE intended victim. Not to say I'd put it past the RIAA, but we should make sure before flinging accusations.

Re:Bad reputation

[Brandybuck]

Public Linux servers have been hacked, to be sure. But this is a much different thing from discovering a new worm every week floating around the Windows world.

To hack into the Gentoo, Gnome, Debian and GNU servers, the crackers had to sit down and work at it. It didn't come for free. But write a new worm variant and several million p2p and outlook users will deliver it to your victims for free.

Think of your home's security. Anyone with a sledgehammer can break into your home, regardless of the quality of your deadbolts. That's what happened to those servers. But in the windows world we get a bunch of houses with hollow veneer front door with a brass flip latch for a lock, and no back door at all, just a wide open portal.

Even with a steel door and twenty deadbolts, eardrum destroying alarm, and a pair of Rottweilers, you could still get broken into. But that's no reason to encourage the burglars with cardboard doors and a lawn sign that says "if it's not too much trouble, could you please not break into my home tonight".

Re:Oh hum.

[Emperor Tiberius]

Ya, but what do you do when all of the Windows machines they've failed to keep virus free start clogging your core routers with virus traffic?