However, this worm might not be so harmless as it appears because of collateral damage: Bank of America ATMs Disrupted by Virus http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=578&e=3&cid=569&u=/nm/2 0030125/tc_nm/tech_virus_dc "SEATTLE (Reuters) - Bank of America Corp. said on Saturday that customers at a majority of its 13,000 automatic teller machines were unable to process customer transactions after a malicious computer worm nearly froze Internet traffic worldwide." Richard M. Smith http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com -----Original Message----- From: Jason Coombs [mailto:jasonc@science.org] Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 4:41 PM To: Jay D. Dyson; Bugtraq Subject: RE: MS SQL WORM IS DESTROYING INTERNET BLOCK PORT 1434! Jay Dyson wrote: > And to think...up until tonight, I thought the vulnerabilities > that paved the way for Nimda were the worst that Microsoft could do > to the net.community. They've really topped themselves this time. As of now we don't know who wrote the worm, but we do know that it looks like a concept worm with no malicious payload. There is a good argument to be made in favor of such worms. Whomever did write this worm could have done severe damage beyond unfocused DDoS and chose not to do so. One would expect intelligence agencies in developed countries to write and release precisely this type of concept worm as a form of mass inoculation against malicious attacks. Before you get upset at your vendor, or anyone else's, consider the bigger picture and recognize the increased security hardening the Internet just received. Belief in this silver lining shouldn't be taken too far, of course, but flaming anyone over an event like this is misplaced considering the number of infosec experts who would probably have agreed to write this worm if approached by their nations' government with proof that an adversary was planning to cause severe harm by exploiting the W32/SQLSlammer vulnerability. Sincerely, Jason Coombs jasonc@science.org
