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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."
If the mechanism exists, it will be compromised. Haven't you leaned anything yet? Better design a system that can't process a worm.
The temptation if this became a strategy, i.e. the system can run Microsoft Worms only, would in a very short time, run Microsoft like worms.
This seems more like and admission that their systems can't be secured.
Or "Who's finger is in the dike? Dammit, thats not my dike!"
then we got hit with the anti-slammer worm. The slammer worm hadn't infected us, but the anti-slammer did, and wound up rebooting about 20 servers (which begs the question "why weren't they already patched?"), during the middle of the day. Pure panic mode as they started spontaneously rebooting.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
It's an interesting idea, but still causes some of the big collateral problems that worms cause. Welchia brought university and corporate networks to their knees because of high traffic just as well as Blaster did
You could program the worm to spread based on a random calculation, and assign it a threshold so the traffic isn't excessive. This would give the worm a very low probability to survive.
However, a better approach IMO would be to get rid of all the Genuine Advantage and activation crack, and allow boxes using old and famous activation keys (such as the "devil's own") to get updated with Windows Update.