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Lessons Learned From Blaster
CowboyRobot writes "It's been nearly a year since Blaster struck, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in fixes and lost revenue.
Jim Morrison of Symantec goes step-by-step in looking at how the Blaster worm got out of control so quickly, and what lessons can be learned from that event, by studying how one utility company dealt with it." The story is written as a fun, technothriller narrative; here's an snippet: "The laptops, usually out in the field, were always a hit-and-miss proposition to find on the network and deliver a patch or to have the user take the machine to a field office. That meant that on the 16th they could see a flood of traffic launched against Microsoft. The second phase of Blaster, launching a DoS (denial of service) attack against windowsupdate.com, was imminent."
Eheh, I couldn't help but chuckle when I read "Jim Morrison". Totally destroys the seriousness of the article.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
Lost in a Roman
Wilderness of Pain
And all the Children
Are insane!
Heh.
The conference room used for the first discussions had been converted to a war room. The whiteboards were filled with IP addresses gathered by the help desk of systems suspected of being infected and trying to propagate the worm. Another list for all of the nonfunctional pay systems covered the entire portable whiteboard. These systems would have to be patched before they could be used to receive payments again.
:)
Red Alert! All senior officers to the battle bridge. Prepare for saucer seperation in T minus 3 minutes and counting.
Picard: Data, can you locate the origin of infection?
Data: It will take aproximatly 10 minutes to scan each subnet.
Picard: We don't have that kind of time. Number One, options?
Riker: Disconnect the OC3 and raise the firewall, leave no ports open.
Captain: That should buy us some time but we need a better solution than that.
Diana: I am sensing something captain, it feels as if the SUS server has fallen offline, we may have missed the latest patches
Data: Her hypothesis could be correct
We are the Borg, We will assimilate you!
Captain: Damn, and here I was thinking it was The Boy and his nanites again
No offense Wil
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
The Blaster Worm awoke before dawn.
He put his boots on.
I've clicked on the words "Cindy Crawford Strip Tease.scr" in your post, but it doesn't seem to open the picture. What am I doing wrong?
naahh.. he had to fix the draft coming in from the Windows.
But how many millions of dollars saved, when people
- stopped playing solitare while their system was hozed.
- stopped reading slashdot while their system was hozed.
- switched to Linux, saving the company licensing costs for years to come.
I'd love to see if these millions saved = the millions lost.I bought a mac.
Damn skippy. Linux for critical systems, Windows for games.
MCSE-minesweeper consutant and solitare expert.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
I love the little flash advertisement which is attached to this article, claiming Microsoft outperforms Linux by a factor of 276%. They must be talking about worm propagation efficiency.