Liudvikas Bukys

Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet

August 20, 2001, 2:37 pm

Flash Security Focus:

Flash Worms: Thirty Seconds to Infect the Internet
Stuart Staniford, Gary Grim, Roelof Jonkman,
Silicon Defense, 8/16/2001
In a recent very ingenious analysis, Nick Weaver at UC Berkeley proposed the possibility of a Warhol Worm that could spread across the Internet and infect all vulnerable servers in less than 15 minutes (much faster than the hours or days seen in Worm infections to date, such as Code Red).
In this note, we observe that there is a variant of the Warhol strategy that could plausibly be used and that could result in all vulnerable servers on the Internet being infected in less than thirty seconds (possibly significantly less). We refer to this as a Flash Worm, or flash infection.
We have run out of hyberbolic adjectives to describe how seriously vulnerable the Internet is to security disruptions, so we won’t comment further on the social implications of this.
Warhol Worms: The Potential for Very Fast Internet Plagues
by
Nicholas C Weaver
(nweaver@cs.berkeley.edu)
“In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of fame”
-Andy Warhol

[Security Focus]

Category: LINKS, security | Comment

Holding Intruders Accountable on the Internet (paper)

August 20, 2001, 2:31 pm

Holding Intruders Accountable on the Internet (paper) [Security Focus]

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We won’t tell you what this patch does, but apply it NOW

August 20, 2001, 2:26 pm

The Register: We won’t tell you what this patch does, but apply it NOW

There’s an extremely serious security problem with GroupWise that requires an immediate patch, but the problem is apparently so bad that Novell can’t even bring itself to tell its users what it is.

The Utah-based software firm has issued an email to its GroupWise 5.5 Enhancement Pack or GroupWise 6 users asking them that to apply the “Padlock Fix” to their servers immediately but isn’t telling anybody why it’s needed, lest hackers exploit the problem on unpatched systems.

[Security Focus]

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New IIS server fixes do more than catch-up on patches

August 20, 2001, 2:03 pm

New IIS server fixes do more than catch-up on patches

In a message to the NTBugtaq security mailing list he edits, Russ Cooper advised Windows 2000 and Windows NT server administrators not to overlook the new patch just because it seems to repeat repairs they’ve already made.

“I’m loath to ask you to now go back to all of these machines and apply yet another patch,” he wrote. “However… there are several circumstances that may apply to your systems that might make it necessary for you to get this new Security Bulletin patch applied quickly.”

[via Security Focus]

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