Kama Sutra Worm Hits Softly

An anonymous reader writes "Despite warnings of the danger posed by the Kama Sutra worm, ZDNet is reporting that things haven't been nearly as bad as expected." From the article: "There have been 'no reports of any (Kama Sutra) detonations so far. Also, the virus seems to be dropping in e-mail prevalence. It was down to second place yesterday, according to our monitoring stations, and slid again into third place today,' Paul Ducklin, head of technology at Sophos Asia-Pacific, told ZDNet Australia. The worm's ranking was overtaken by MyDoom and Netsky variants, which have been around for a number of years. "

Comments

IT'S NOT A WORM!

[SanityInAnarchy]

It's a virus.

Surely Slashdot knows the difference? A virus/trojan relies on user stupidity. A worm relies on software insecurity.

Re:IT'S NOT A WORM!

[TheSkyIsPurple]

Really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm

A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. A virus attaches itself to, and becomes part of, another executable program; however, a worm is self-contained and does not need to be part of another program to propagate itself....The main difference between a computer virus and a worm is that a virus can not propagate by itself whereas worms can. A worm uses a network to send copies of itself to other systems and it does so without any intervention

This thing (from what little I read) emails itself around when it can... which would qualify it as a worm.
I'm a little fuzzy on the intervention part... the user has to to the initial activation, which could be intervention, but then again you have to do the initial activation with viruses, so I don't think that qualifies.

This thing doesn't seem to make itself part of another executable persé, so it wouldn't quite qualify as a virus.

Maybe I read my definitions wrong...

Re:Comparisons to other worms are misleading

[JesseL]

Actually, from what I gather rain does cause more damage than tornadoes. In 1999 rain (floods) caused $5.4 billion in property damage in the US, while tornadoes caused $1.1 billion worth of damage.

http://www.flooddamagedata.org/data/national331401 4-495.txt
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/sourcebook/torna does.html

"Despite"?

[Thad Boyd]

Despite warnings, or BECAUSE of them? The Houston Chronicle thinks the latter, and I'm inclined to agree.

Re:The big question remains

[Jazzer_Techie]

The people over at F-Secure seem to think it's too early for any real damage assesment. Their arguement makes a lot of sense.
--
From the weblog:
So far today we haven't received any significant Nyxem damage reports.
Vast majority of the machines infected by Nyxem are home computers. Nothing will happen on them until people get home from work and boot up their machines. Half an hour later the damage starts. The user won't realise what's going on until an hour or two later, when it's already late Friday night.
The full scope of the problem won't come to light until during the weekend or early next week.
We'd like to think that they whole problem was avoided and everybody cleaned up their machines in time. But unfortunately that's probably not true.

Re:What? I don't understand....

[Fishstick]

Funny, but a nit-pick, if I may...

* At least 18 - 5 = 13 years of training required by U.S. law.

take a look a this: http://www.avert.org/aofconsent.htm

the age of consent in the US differs from state to state, 18 in (quick count) only 13 states (most 16, 17)

and the US State with the lowest AoC goes to... (drumroll)

South Carolina @ 14!

They should adopt "Lowest age of consent law in the union!" as their new state motto and put it on license plates.