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17 items tagged "worms"
Slashdot: IT
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'Worms From Hell' Unearth Possibilities For Extraterrestrial Life
Posted: June 2nd, 2011, 4:12pm CEST by Roblimo
Tags: worms
An anonymously submitted article says, "For the first time, scientists have found complex, multi-celled creatures living a mile and more below the planet’s surface, raising new possibilities about the spread of life on Earth and potential subsurface life on other planets and moons (abstract). ... The research is likely to trigger scientific challenges and cause some controversy because it places far more complex life in an environment where researchers have generally held it should not, or even cannot, exist." -
Stuxnet Worms On
Posted: October 5th, 2010, 10:57pm CEST by CmdrTaco
Tags: worms
Numerous Stuxnet related stories continue to flow through my bin today, so brace yourself: Unsurprisingly, Iran blames Stuxnet on a plot set up by the West, designed to infect its nuclear facilities. A Symantec researcher analyzed the code and put forth attack scenarios. A Threatpost researcher writes about the sophistication of the worm. Finally, Dutch multinationals have revealed that the worm is also attacking them. We may never know what this thing was really all about.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Stuxnet Worm Claimed To Be Devastating In Iran
Posted: September 29th, 2010, 2:48pm CEST by CmdrTaco
Tags: worms
sciencewatcher writes "At debka.com, a website associated with intelligence communities focusing on the Middle East, the claim is made that Tehran this week secretly appealed to a number of computer security experts in West and East Europe with offers of handsome fees for consultations on ways to exorcise the Stuxnet worm spreading havoc through the computer networks and administrative software of its most important industrial complexes and military command centers."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Stuxnet Worm Infected Industrial Control Systems
Posted: September 18th, 2010, 12:08am CEST by Soulskill
Tags: worms
Sooner Boomer writes "ComputerWorld has an article about the Stuxnet worm, which was apparently designed to steal industrial secrets and disrupt operations at industrial plants, according to Siemens. 'Stuxnet has infected systems in the UK, North America and Korea, however the largest number of infections, by far, have been in Iran. Once installed on a PC, Stuxnet uses Siemens' default passwords to seek out and try to gain access to systems that run the WinCC and PCS 7 programs — so-called PLC (programmable logic controller) programs that are used to manage large-scale industrial systems on factory floors and in military installations and chemical and power plants.' If the worm were to be used to disrupt systems at any of those locations, the results could be devastating."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Anti-US Hacker Takes Credit For Worm
Posted: September 13th, 2010, 2:09pm CEST by timothy
Tags: worms
angry tapir writes "Credit for the "Here You Have" worm (recently discussed on Slashdot), has been taken by a hacker known as 'Iraq Resistance' who says the worm was designed, in part, as a propaganda tool. He said he had not expected the worm to spread as broadly as it had, and noted that he could have done much more damage to victims. 'I could smash all those infected but I wouldn't,' said the hacker. 'I hope all people understand that I am not negative person!' In other parts of the message, he was critical of the US war in Iraq. For a brief period early the worm accounted for about 10 percent of the spam on the Internet."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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First iPhone Worm Discovered, Rickrolls Jailbroken Phones
Posted: November 8th, 2009, 4:08pm CET by Soulskill
Tags: worms
Unexpof writes "Users of jailbroken iPhones in Australia are reporting that their wallpapers have been changed by a worm to an image of '80s pop icon Rick Astley. This is the first time a worm has been reported in the wild for the Apple iPhone. According to a report by Sophos, the worm, which exploits users who have installed SSH and not changed the default password, hunts for other vulnerable iPhones and infects them. Users are advised to properly secure their jailbroken iPhones with a non-default password, and Sophos says the worm is not harmless, despite its graffiti-like payload: 'Accessing someone else's computing device and changing their data without permission is an offense in many countries — and just as with graffiti there is a cost involved in cleaning-up affected iPhones. ... Other inquisitive hackers may also be tempted to experiment once they read about the world's first iPhone worm. Furthermore, a more malicious hacker could take the code written by ikee and adapt it to have a more sinister payload.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Twitter Gets Slammed By the StalkDaily XSS Worm
Posted: April 12th, 2009, 5:13pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: worms
CurtMonash writes "Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims' accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Conficker Downloads Payload
Posted: April 9th, 2009, 2:41pm CEST by CmdrTaco
Tags: worms
nk497 writes "Conficker seems to finally be doing something, a week after hype around the worm peaked on April Fool's Day. It has now downloaded components from the Waledac botnet, which could contain rootkit capabilities. Trend Micro security expert Rik Ferguson said: 'These components have so far been missing, but could this finally be the "other boot dropping" that we have all been been waiting for?' Ferguson also suggested that people behind Conficker could be the very same who are running Waledac and created the Storm botnet. 'It tallies with some of the assumptions people have made about Conficker — that the first variant was actively trying to avoid the Ukraine because Waledac was Eastern European,' Ferguson added."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Microsoft Warns of Copycat Conficker Worm
Posted: April 7th, 2009, 3:20pm CEST by timothy
Tags: worms
nk497 writes "Microsoft is warning that malware writers have adapted a four-year-old virus to use features of Conficker to take advantage of Windows flaws. Other similarities between the adapted Neeris worm and Conficker are that it downloads a copy of the worm from the attacking machine using HTTP, spreads via autorun, and uses a driver to patch the TCP/IP layer of the system. It even saw a traffic jump around the first of April, when the Conficker hype peaked. But the Microsoft researchers suggested Conficker may have copied Neeris, or that they're copying each other: 'It is possible that these miscreants somehow collaborate or at least are aware of each other's "products."'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Conficker Worm Strike Reports Start Rolling In
Posted: April 1st, 2009, 4:10pm CEST by Soulskill
Tags: worms
Nieriko writes "Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components. Here are a couple of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports: — '... shortly after midnight local time, an ATM in the capital city of Reykjavik began spewing 100-Krona notes. ... A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Ponder Conficker's April Fool's Activation Date
Posted: March 21st, 2009, 5:18pm CET by Soulskill
Tags: worms
The Narrative Fallacy writes "John Markoff has a story at the NY Times speculating about what will happen on April 1 when the Conficker worm is scheduled to activate. Already on an estimated 12 million machines, conjectures about Conficker's purpose ranges from the benign — an April Fool's Day prank — to far darker notions. Some say the program will be used in the 'rent-a-computer-crook' business, something that has been tried previously by the computer underground. 'The most intriguing clue about the purpose of Conficker lies in the intricate design of the peer-to-peer logic of the latest version of the program, which security researchers are still trying to completely decode,' writes Markoff. According to a paper by researchers at SRI International, in the Conficker C version of the program, infected computers can act both as clients and servers and share files in both directions. With these capabilities, Conficker's authors could be planning to create a scheme like Freenet, the peer-to-peer system that was intended to make Internet censorship of documents impossible. On a darker note, Stefan Savage, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego, has suggested the possibility of a 'Dark Google.' 'What if Conficker is intended to give the computer underworld the ability to search for data on all the infected computers around the globe and then sell the answers,' writes Markoff. 'That would be a dragnet — and a genuine horror story.'"Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Conficker Worm Asks For Instructions, Gets Update
Posted: March 16th, 2009, 4:46pm CET by CmdrTaco
Tags: worms
KingofGnG writes "Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido malware, that according to Symantec 'is, to date, one of the most complex worms in the history of malicious code,' has been updated and this time for real. The new variant, dubbed W32.Downadup.C, adds new features to malware code and makes the threat even more dangerous and worrisome than before."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Romanians Find Cure For Conficker
Posted: March 13th, 2009, 7:11am CET by timothy
Tags: worms
mask.of.sanity writes "BitDefender has released what it claims is the first vaccination tool to remove the notorious Conficker virus that infected some 9 million Windows machines in about three months. The worm, also known as Downadup, exploits a bug in the Windows Server service used by Windows 2000, XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008. It spreads primarily through a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows Server Service where it disables the operating system update service, security center, including Windows Defender, and error reporting. The Romanian security vendor said its removal tool will delete all versions of Downadup and will not be detected by the virus."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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New Conficker Variant Increases Its Flexibility
Posted: February 21st, 2009, 12:58am CET by Soulskill
Tags: worms
CWmike writes "Criminals behind the widespread Conficker worm have released a new version that could signal a major shift in the way the malware operates. The new variant, dubbed Conficker B++, was spotted three days ago by SRI International researchers, who published details of the new code on Thursday. To the untrained eye, the new variant looks almost identical to the previous version of the worm, Conficker B. But the B++ variant uses new techniques to download software, giving its creators more flexibility in what they can do with infected machines."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Hijack Storm Worm To Track Profits
Posted: November 8th, 2008, 4:14pm CET by Soulskill
Tags: worms
An anonymous reader points out a story in the Washington Post, which begins: "A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam. Over a period of about a month in the Spring of 2008, researchers at the University of California, San Diego and UC Berkeley sought to measure the conversion rate of spam by quietly infiltrating the Storm worm botnet, a vast collection of compromised computers once responsible for sending an estimated 20 percent of all spam." The academic paper (PDF) is also available. We've previously discussed another group of researchers who were able to infiltrate the botnet for a different purpose.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Storm and the Future of Social Engineering
Posted: June 12th, 2008, 2:51pm CEST by CmdrTaco
Tags: worms
Albert writes "Storm shows several key characteristics, some new and advanced. It uses cunning social engineering techniques — such as tying spam campaigns to a current event or site of interest — as well as a blend of email and the Web to spread. It is highly coordinated, yet decentralized — and with Storm using the latest generation of P2P technology, it cannot be disabled by simply 'cutting off its head.' In addition, Storm is self-propagating — once infected, computers send out massive amounts of Storm spam to keep recruiting new nodes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Researchers Tout New Network Worm Weapon
Posted: June 5th, 2008, 12:57am CEST by samzenpus
Tags: worms
coondoggie writes "Can Internet worms be thwarted within minutes of their infection? Researchers at Ohio State University believe they can. The key, researchers found, is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans — a sign that it has been infected — administrators should take it off line and check it for viruses. In a nutshell, the researchers developed a model that calculated the probability that a virus would spread, depending on the maximum number of scans allowed before a machine was taken off line.'The difficulty was figuring out how many scans were too many,' researchers said."Read more of this story at Slashdot.