MAJOR COMPUTER WORM ATTACKS COMPUTER SYSTEMS

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A computer worm shut down computer systems running Windows 2000 software across the United States Tuesday, hitting computers at CNN, ABC and the New York Times.

The Caterpiller Co. in Peoria, Ill. was also reportedly affected. Around 5 p.m., computers began crashing at CNN facilities in New York and Atlanta. ABC said their problems began in New York about 1:30 p.m. David Perry of Trend Micro said that the attack seems to have been triggered by a new worm, called worm--rbot.ebq.  He said that the symptoms, of computers repeatedly shutting down and rebooting, was consistent with that virus.

Johannes Ullrich, director of the Sans Institute, a network security firm in Jacksonville, Fla., said the outage may also have been caused by the Zotob worm, which was released last weekend.

"It will connect to a control server to ask for instructions. It scans network neighborhoods and tries to infect them as well," he said.  Several versions of the worm have been released, some as late as Tuesday, he said.

While the worm primarily affects Windows 2000, it can also affect some early versions of Microsoft XP, he said.
"Typically, the infective vector is a laptop connected to unsecured networks," Ullrich said. "This laptop will infect your systems from the inside."

Microsoft has made a patch to counter Zotob, he said. Perry said that the Rbot worm may be a derivative of the Zotob worm.  He said that the worm was very new. At any given time, there are thousands of computer worms and viruses in existence.  Most are stopped from becoming widespread problems by anti-virus software.

That text came from an urgent Paltalk staff newsletter that I received yesterday.

I must admit, my security strategy for the home\office network is a bit poor at times. Some AV doesn't always do well at updating and it gets left far too long. All my machines are running Win2000 and I haven't had a single problem with virii\worms\trojans or any other out of the ordinary goings on.

I've just stuck a new server in and am currently cleaning\updating and logging machines onto the domain and I haven't found one that has got any major issues with it. Even the one that is sat in a DMZ with hardly any protection on it has nothing much wrong with it.

So, if you do get hit by all these trojans\worms\virii that people keep spamming boards with then you must really be asking for it.

Fair enough, I was generalising a bit!

The rough point I was getting at was some of these threats are not as bad as some people make out.

For me personally, I am more inconvenienced by people "helpfully" posting all about these things on boards and forums everywhere.

[quote author=plugwash  link=1124305465/0#7 date=1124745750]true i'm rapidly moving towards the opinion that using internet explorer as your main browser is asking for it nowadays.

anti virus software will only stop known threats and anti virus firms are scared of treating spyware as the scum it is because spyware writers unlike virus writers often have money for lawsuits......

anti spyware software has similar problems and there is the aditional problem that there is a lot of fake anti spyware software out there.

so your best option is to avoid using IE which frankly has more holes than a wheel of swiss cheese thats been hit with a shotgun blast [/quote]


I think there's an echo in here, I've been banging on about that since I got here! lol


mozillythekid