Slashdot Mirror
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. "
It sounds like the news over hyped a story for no reason. Say it ain't so!
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."
that might just be the raciest title on a /. article ever. W0W
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!
Of course it's soft at first. But wait until it changes positions a few times! It will be surprisingly intense before long.
/syle
It's a virus.
Surely Slashdot knows the difference? A virus/trojan relies on user stupidity. A worm relies on software insecurity.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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...
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.
Do I ever... My father insisted on turning off the answering machine, because it was digital one that did voice stamps and other complex features, and the "virus could spread through the phone lines".
+1 to my dad for knowing that the answering machine did have a computer as a component
-100 for thinking that it was susceptible to a virus dialing it up and infecting it
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Yeah but just wait til the Tantra worm hits... wait for it... wait for it....
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