Useful virii/worms

[Andrew_Baker]

Ah, finally proof that virii and worms can have a function other than messing up people's computers:

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/18/1 ... 90&tid=201

[anubis]

I heard of a japanese comp. scientist do something more like having viruses that could do things like defragmenting the hard disk and the likes.

The aims of the project done are something high like creating self mutating versions of these "good" viruses, that could self download patches and updates and so on.

[rwfromxenon]

Wow...
Is it possible that this worm was written by the author of Blaster?

Anyway, isn't the technical term for virus a hidden program that automates things on your system?

[Eero Ränik]

I don't want that my computer started to install patches or to defragment my hard drives without my agreement, and if it would ask the user about it, then it wouldn't be a virus...
Oh, and Windows includes a virus too, it's called Task Scheduler.

[failrate]

Oh, yeah, and at home I've got this crazy cron daemon that does all kinds of stuff without asking. I'm considering getting a book of spells to exorcise the daemon.

[distantvoices]

hehe... a task scheduler regarded as a virus... then, in my homebrew os (no, no beer) there are more than one of those virii. ]:->

cron is ok.

[Ozguxxx]

Ive heard of people using trojan horses for good purposes, for reaching home computers form office, etc. But as long as I do not write it I would not do sth like this.

[Eero Ränik]

hehe... a task scheduler regarded as a virus... then, in my homebrew os (no, no beer) there are more than one of those virii. ]:->

Actually, I don't think that task schedulers are viruses, I did a little joke about words

Anyway, isn't the technical term for virus a hidden program that automates things on your system?

Ive heard of people using trojan horses for good purposes, for reaching home computers form office, etc. But as long as I do not write it I would not do sth like this.

And most of these trojan horses can be used by others to access your data in home, as long as they have access to your hard drive in work, which isn't so unusual in offices...

[Andrew_Baker]

In similar news, MS will be shipping Windows soon with an automatic updater... so a worm that does the same job suddenly lacks nearly as much villainy as a component build into the OS.

Anyway, this worm wasn't just an automatic task scheduler, as it wasn't intended to work on just one machine. To whit, it was intended to propagate an exploit fix across all networked systems by using the very exploit that it... uh... exploited. That is, it was kind of like that sealant that you pour into your radiator that saturates the holes in the radiator, and then gums up, filling those same holes. Honestly, it's a pretty cool hack, although it could be used for villainy. Of course, since worms and virii are already used for evil purposes, people can't argue that the technology can be misappropriated, as its very misappropriation is to turn it into a tool for good.

Besides, without something sneaky like this, I can imagine how few people would have ever realized they had such a vulnerability nor been able to properly fix it themselves.

[Schol-R-LEA]

Might I suggest that this be renamed the Morgaine worm?

Or perhaps the class of worms could be called 'Changeling' worms, with individual ones given names like Ivrel, Shiuan, etc.

[Andrew_Baker]

Ha! I guess all of those security patch downloads are actually causing huge network slowdowns. The designer should have implemented some kind of distributed download or something to ensure that all of the modified worm copies didn't try to download the patch all at once.

http://slashdot.org/articles/03/08/20/0 ... 187&tid=95

[anubis]

Worm Vs Worm.

Terminator 3 is slowly becoming true.

[Tim]

In similar news, MS will be shipping Windows soon with an automatic updater...

Windows has had automatic updates since Windows 2000 SP3.

[Andrew_Baker]

Yeah, but the new updater won't even ask if you want to update.