Slashdot Mirror
Looking Back At the Other Kind of Virus
Slatterz writes "All this panic over a strain of flu got these people thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world. This list of the top ten worst viruses includes some interesting trivia, including ARPANET's Creeper virus in 1971, how early attempts at copy protection resulted in Brain, and MyDoom's denial of service attack on SCO."
Is the old floppy-to-floppy style of virus nearing extinction, or will poisoned bittorrent files breathe new life into this kind of chicanery?
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
At last, an article from a major outlet that doesn't break up into ten seperate pages, one for each item, all in hopes of getting more page/ad views. :)
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Code Red wreaked havoc on the routers at the place I was working for back in 2001. That was the virus that caused ISP's to block the ports for all those peronal web servers running for no reason. Well the ISP's relised that they could cut thier traffic in half by leaving the ports blocked permanently. The virus allowed an infected machine to receive remote commands via IE cgi commands. You could check the router log to see who was infected, connect to the IP with IE and read and write to thier hard drive. The virus was named by the security team that found it, they were drinking Mountain Dew Code Red at the time.
They're waiting for slashdot readers to enumerate the last two. They'll read all the "They forgot xxx virus" comments and by tomorrow, they'll wrap up #2 and #1.
My girlfriend told me i got herpies from using her laptop
The real worry is that a computer virus will make the leap into the human population.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Top ten incomplete top ten lists:
10) That virus one
9) This one
The first I heard about nimda was one of the senior engineers in our company telling me to scan my PC and let him know if anything showed up. The only thing that did was a java script trojan dropper which was relatively harmless, but by the time I'd finished everyone was sitting around waiting for the company network to be given the all clear.
Nimda seemed to show a preference for hitting file servers. Even though my machine was clear at the start, I was just checking through a shared folder and *bam*, as soon as the mouse moved across a file called readme.txt.js (The final extension was hidden, but this didn't make any difference.) a tftp connection was opened to the host, and fortunately the antivirus had been updated by that time, and so stopped it. The preview bug that caused this was a zero day.
I was on a win98 box at the time, some people on unpatched NT machines fared worse (Yeah yeah, I know patch or die.. but the company I was at didn't take endpoint security seriously, it was a wake up call to the IT department, this was the first and last worm to really own our network.) they got hit by the worm like behaviour, from directory traversal attacks with no assistance from the user needed. Nimda shut us down for days, during the first few all clears our antivirus provider was still learning all the attack vectors, so it kept coming back.
I'd like to throw a few bricks at Symantec over this, but it was a shocking learning experience for more than just them. I doubt another event like this will happen on well managed networks.. It will just be the odd trojan leaking information and joining a botnet. Or maybe some idiot connecting his personal modem behind the firewall, but I can only hope not.
In SOVIET RUSSIA the hot grits profit you!
For the zillionth time, in Latin times, no one had the kind of technology to be able to see viruses, so no one knew they were individual things. The word 'virus' thus refered to a liquid, like an infected substance, and therefore was measured in unitS of quanitY (eg, 2 gallons of petrol, or 4 glasses of apple juice), not unit quantities (eg 4 individual apples). Notice where pluralisation occurs. To suggest Latin rules for pluralisation is absurd because the latin word wasn't to be pluralised; the units of measurement were to be. Learned folk should not repeat this mistake.
(I'm sure those with greater knowledge of Latin could weigh in on other reasons why 'virii' is incorrect, this is just the one I've been made aware of)
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
The single biggest rule I use is. "Which language am I speaking?".
If the answer is English, then who cares from which language the word originated, and how that language may or may not have pluralised it?
In English, we append '-s' or '-es', so if in doubt, do that.
Doing so may not be correct all the time, but at least when it's wrong it looks like a simple mistake, rather than pretentious hyper-correction.
Advanced users are users too!