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keith2468
Premium Member
join:2001-02-03
Winnipeg, MB

1 recommendation

keith2468 to underattack

Premium Member

to underattack

why few worms destructive

There is a reason why influenze is a far more successful virus that kills many times more people than ebola.

Ebola victims are contagious for only a few hours or a day before they are incapacitated. And then they quickly die.

Influenza leaves most of its victims walking around contagious.

Another reason for the lack of "fatal" computer viruses are the motivations of different sorts of virus writers and distributers:

- Simply wanting to make other people's machines available for conversion to commercial spamming or pustro zombies.

- Out for publicity or recognition for having discover a "serious exploit" or having "written a virus", but not wanting to do any real damage (not thinking about admins getting sacked, SOHOs going belly-up, or the shut-in elderly loosing their computers). (If you want to impress me, write an AV tool or an OS.)

- Out for kicks, but afraid of hard jail time

- Out for little rebellious kicks and too ignorant to realize the real damage viruses and trojans create (again not thinking about admins getting sacked, SOHOs going belly-up, or the shut-in elderly loosing their computers).

- "Promoting security" but not wanting to spur true comprehensive security reform because it would result in a lot of security firms and departments closing up shop.

SYNACK
Just Firewall It
Mod
join:2001-03-05
Venice, CA

SYNACK

Mod

An intriguing note from the writeup at eeye:

"It should be noted that the BlackICE/RealSecure engine listens for packets received on the broadcast interface. This allows the vulnerability to be exploited simultaneously across every vulnerable host within a targeted network by issuing a single, spoofed, UDP datagram."

I am curious how many other vulnerabilities can be exploited in this fashion.