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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. "
I, for one, would favor a slightly smarter Internet that simply filtered out known threats, stopping any further spread once they're identified. The fact that attacks continue to run years after they're first known is just plain stupid!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
when there is a particular date they can get in a tizzy about. No one will know they were making a mountain out of a mole hill until the "crisis" has passed. Remeber the michelangelo virus?
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Sorry, it IS so. The media uses end-of-the-world headlines because it gets people riled up and excited, and this news about the Kama Sutra worm falls into that category...
My sig is permanently on strike.
Does this mean A) we've done a good job training our users or B) no one infected with this worm is willing to admit it?
Most of the users I support would rather reconstruct their documents than admit they clicked on a "free pr0n" e-mail. Wonder how accurate this news really is.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Possibly, the reason it didn't hit so hard was the fact that it was so hyped.
If someone warns me that I'm about to get hit by a car, and I move and avoid being hit, I wouldn't say that there was nothing to be worried about.
And think how many more people, having done that, are at least in some way a little more protected from becoming a spam zombie.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
The worm's ranking was overtaken by MyDoom and Netsky variants, which have been around for a number of years.
This information distorts the issue. Kama Sutra carries an extremely destructive payload, deleting a user's local data and data on attached network drives (and, worse, the antivirus software on the networked computers can't prevent these deletions). This cannot be directly compared to MyDoom or NetSky, which merely clog networks, install backdoors (that are not usually used for anything nearly as destructive), and turn computers into spam and DoS zombies.
The above statement is like saying that rainstorms have overtaken tornados in prevalence. That doesn't matter, because tornados do much, much more damage than rainstorms do.
In all fairness though, you may not notice a critical document has been lost until a few days down the line...
A new MS company that fixes bugs that the viruses are taking advantage of.
How many here, have had a win-sysadmin, send out messages "please don't open mails with the subjest 'OpenMePlease', it will possibly cause bad things."
Sounds like a serious bug with the mail program. The mail program should not by default run attached programs or open attatche documents that trigger macros.
I really think that people are becoming more and more prepared for viruses, I would also venture to say that more and more people are running virus scanners and more and more isps are filtering the content of the emails and other methods of transmissions.
Overreaction? Maybe, but definitly better than underreaction.
And think how many of those people now believe the little more protection they just purchased is absolute protection and that they're free to open any and all attachments they get from now on.
And just look at it this way, if a person was only prompted to install an AV system when the news hyped up this worm then do you think that same person will be very likely to keep the system updated and run regular checks? Doubtful.
Semper Fi
Healthy paranoia or y2k-like panic? Personally, from all the attention these warnings have generated, I was expecting mayham; instead, we get "no reports of Kama Sutra explosions."
Maybe this was the reaction intended by the author of the worm - to prepare the real next BIG attack when no one pays attention to warnings anymore.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.