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'Friendly' Worms Could Spread Software Fixes
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft researchers are working out the perfect strategies for worms to spread through networks. Their goal is to distribute software patches and other friendly information via virus, reducing load on servers. This raises the prospect of worm races — deploying a whitehat worm to spread a fix faster than a new attacking worm can reach vulnerable machines."
So now Microsoft will have a new way to control legions of zombie PC's. Vista adoption numbers must be really bad
This was called the cheese worm a few years ago. I think it's a good idea. There are a lot of irresponsible admins out there, especially, I'm afraid, those running Windows. I recall vividly in the mid 90s when these things started emerging, I was getting "attacks" from Windows hosts on my network. I tracked down the origin and went to the effort of contacting the admins - I even telephoned a couple, since I got interested in what was happening. The response, unanimously, was they were content to wait until Microsoft came out with a solution. That's right, they were running compromised hosts, that were busy infecting other hosts and polluting the net, but they were going to wait until someone came out with an automatic solution.
Nowadays it's a lost cause. So many people are just lazy. I told a family member her IM (MSN) was sending fake invites to people in her contact list, and she said she didn't have time to deal with it. I could have told her that she's going to be infecting people exponentially, but it wouldn't matter.