CYBERZEST.COM
TOTAL WEBSITE PROMOTION
SOLUTION
click here

Home

Articles
 > Website design
 > Website promotion
 > Online advertising
 > Ecommerce
 > Web Trivia

Web Strategy Blog

The Latest Missile

Name W32.Sasser.B

Nickname Sasser

Creator An 18-year-old German student.

Attacks Vulnerability in Microsoft’s Windows Operating System, again.

Poor Windows

Microsoft seems to have everything - money, power, the supposed best brains even politicians. It even plays war games on the net vis a vis Netscape Vs Explorer, Google Vs Yahoo. Yet in the true democratic tradition of the web, the geeks have their own party. I have forgotten the count of the no. of attacks on Windows operating systems. Every time we are told about xyz vulnerability on the Windows Operating System. If Windows is so vulnerable I wonder why they sell it. As we all know Windows is vulnerable, lets pour no more salt of its wounds and get back to Sasser the worm that wounded Windows.

Extent of Attack

The Sasser worm attacks of last week sent IT staffs around the world scuttling to patch vulnerable Windows systems, dealing with network slow-downs, and switching to old-fashioned paper to handle business. The attacks took their toll in the U.S. and overseas. Delta Airlines, American Express, Associated Press, two major universities, and a leading hospital were among Sasser's victim.

Gang warfare

According to Robert Vamosi, Specialist to ZDNet, it now appears that one gang of virus writers is behind Sasser -- and the nearly 30 variations of Netsky we've seen since February.

Like their urban gang counterparts, virus gangs are interested in marking territory on the Internet and showing off their elite skills. For example, Skynet, the gang believed to be behind Sasser and Netsky, doesn't use IRC chat rooms to communicate. That would be too easy. Instead, members of Skynet use messages within their own viral creations.

Programmers often leave plain-text statements within their code. From statements found embedded within recent viruses, we know that there's been a turf battle raging since February between Skynet, the viral authors of Bagle, and the viral authors using the publicly available MyDoom source code. From Netsky.c: "We are the skynet--you can't hide yourself---we kill malware...MyDoom.f is a thief of our idea!" To which the author of MyDoom.g responded: "Hey, NetSky...Don't ruin our business, wanna start a war?" Mostly the messages have been little more than taunts, and these taunts have even extended to antivirus vendors themselves. 

Mind of Virus Programmer

Consider this article on Washington Post by Clive Thompson

When Mario is bored -- and out here in the countryside, surrounded by soaring snowcapped mountains and little else, he's bored a lot -- he likes to sit at his laptop and create computer viruses and worms. Online, he goes by the name Second Part to Hell, and he has written more than 150 examples of what computer experts call ''malware'': tiny programs that exist solely to self-replicate, infecting computers hooked up to the Internet. Sometimes these programs cause damage, and sometimes they don't. Mario says he prefers to create viruses that don't intentionally wreck data, because simple destruction is too easy. ''Anyone can rewrite a hard drive with one or two lines of code,'' he says. ''It makes no sense. It's really lame.'' Besides which, it's mean, he says, and he likes to be friendly