I just found this amazing - as much as I've been inconvenienced by the stuipd virus going around (over 2000 received (and filtered accordingly) in my inbox thus far), the people behind it seem incredibly smart and you have to give them credit. Being able to pack such a dangerous payload in such a small package (just 70kb) is amazing. Not only does it scan your address book for e-mail addresses, but it also checks your internet cache and spiders it for additional addresses. It then spoofs the originating e-mail address and uses a multi-threaded SMTP engine to fire off countless versions of itself while you are none the wiser.
Now, to top it all off, it has been programmed to query a time server to get the exact time and at that exact time (it was noon pacific today), it would connect to one of 20 random computers. Not just any computer though - a personal home PC that had been previously hijacked by the spammers (it's not hard to take control of a PC that someone has broadband hooked into without a virus scanner or firewall). These 20 computers were not just home PC's, but they were on various networks in various countries, so you couldn't just shut down a subnet of an ISP, you had to work with 20 different ISPs in different countries to get these computers offline. For just one company, that's not easy to do, but once the FBI got involved, it shouldn't have been too hard to shut the computers down. If the spammers were smarter, they would have used 100 computers in 50 countries or something like that, but still, the advanced features of this virus were amazing.
Even more amazing is the stupidity of the general public. They blindly open attachments. They don't update the virus definitions within their virus scanner (if they even run a scanner at all). They don't utilize the Winodws Update website (the hole exploited by the virus has been patchable for weeks now). They don't user a firewall to keep out unwanted traffic...and security experts are stumped as to how this virus spread so fast. 1 - It was expertly programmed...I can only imagine what the payload was waiting on those 20 computers that were shut down by the FBI. And 2 - the general internet public is stupid. They use AOL. They don't patch their system. They just go online, download trojans, open attachments, and don't use an up-to-date virus scanner or firewall. Idiots - the whole lot of them.
URL: F-Secure Computer Virus Information Pages: Sobig.F
Now, to top it all off, it has been programmed to query a time server to get the exact time and at that exact time (it was noon pacific today), it would connect to one of 20 random computers. Not just any computer though - a personal home PC that had been previously hijacked by the spammers (it's not hard to take control of a PC that someone has broadband hooked into without a virus scanner or firewall). These 20 computers were not just home PC's, but they were on various networks in various countries, so you couldn't just shut down a subnet of an ISP, you had to work with 20 different ISPs in different countries to get these computers offline. For just one company, that's not easy to do, but once the FBI got involved, it shouldn't have been too hard to shut the computers down. If the spammers were smarter, they would have used 100 computers in 50 countries or something like that, but still, the advanced features of this virus were amazing.
Even more amazing is the stupidity of the general public. They blindly open attachments. They don't update the virus definitions within their virus scanner (if they even run a scanner at all). They don't utilize the Winodws Update website (the hole exploited by the virus has been patchable for weeks now). They don't user a firewall to keep out unwanted traffic...and security experts are stumped as to how this virus spread so fast. 1 - It was expertly programmed...I can only imagine what the payload was waiting on those 20 computers that were shut down by the FBI. And 2 - the general internet public is stupid. They use AOL. They don't patch their system. They just go online, download trojans, open attachments, and don't use an up-to-date virus scanner or firewall. Idiots - the whole lot of them.
URL: F-Secure Computer Virus Information Pages: Sobig.F
posted by Blake | 20:52
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