Liberty's Blog

MYDoom worm shuts down SCO web site. Worms and Viri are evil, but I find myself cheering for the guys who wrote this one. SCO is not one of the good guys, they are claiming ownership to some of the code used in Linux and is taking it to court. SCO has drawn the ire of the so-called "open source" programming community who object to SCO's claims they have copyright control over key pieces of the Linux operating system. What makes this absurd is the fact that SCO took code from ATT Berkeley and a bunch of other place to creat their operating system. What really must piss SCO off is that they are trying to sell an inferior product to compete with a free product. The damage to SCO though is probably pretty minimal. The site will probably be down sporatically today and recover by tommorrow. The next attack will be on microsoft.com. Microsoft has a bigger server and they are more used to such attacks, and will likely be better prepared for such attack. Both Company's have offered a $250,000 bounty for the arrest and successfull prosecution of the worm authors. It apears unlikely that they will have much success, because the worm seems to have orinated in Russia.

It will be ill advised that anyone let themselves intentionally run the worm because it has a couple of nasty componants. It has been suggested that the worms primary intention is as an aid to spammers. The worm has an smpt componant and opens up a back door. This would allow spammers to gain control of your machine and use infected machines to distribute spam. An easy way to test and clean a supected computer is available if ones Virus Checker is missing nor not effective with Stinger Information on the worm is also available from links there and here.

posted by Liberty @ 10:55 AM