On Thu, 20 Feb 2003, Joshua Smith wrote:
Only if people didn't fix their servers. And if they didn't, this "reverse" denial of service attack is a good reminder.
what was that one worm from a year or two ago that was eliminated from the net, oh yeah, code red......if they didn't fix themselves the first round, what makes you think they will fix it the second time, or the third...
Their link to the net is unusable if they're infected so not doing anything is not an option. If a box is going to be infected, we want it to happen immediately upon installation. Friday night late is no fun... (Un)fortunately, the number of worm packets still coming in is too low for this (about 1 per second for a /19, so it takes a few hours on average for an IP address to be hit.) Also unfortunate is the fact that the worm has shown it can bypass many filters. It's not clear how exactly, but I guess it has something to do with broadcasts or multicasts. So depending on a filter to protect vulnerable boxes isn't an entirely safe approach, especially if there is a lot of infrastructure between the filter and the box. Maybe the best approach is to try and deliberately infect the entire local net every few minutes or so to detect new vulnerable systems while the people installing them are still on the premises.