On Wednesday 25 Jan 2006 22:31, Fergie wrote:
"Of course, itÂ’s possible that this URL has gotten out to the public, which would increase the count (simply hitting the website increments the count by one). However, to my knowledge, this URL is only known in the security community.
The SANS diary suggests that the requests from the worm itself are quite distinctive, so it should be possible to spot idle curiousity, search bots, and other interested parties from the worm itself. Of course it may be that the monitoring of the traffic isn't subtle enough to distinguish between these two types of traffic. Occurs to me that 700,000 Windows reinstalls in a day is probably about average given market share, and reliability of the OS, so 700,000 thousand extra is probably just a busy day. Might be a peak in demand for Windows updates afterwards. The talk of antivirus tools are misplaced, the correct tool to deal with something like this is a good back-up, but for too long people have sold PCs for end users without any backup service at all. My home desktop has a tape backup unit (and RAID 1). I just wish I could be so confident about every desktop we use at work. As Bill Hassell signature said.... "There are two types of computer users in the world...those that have lost data, and those that are going to." (blh, circa 1972)