Forum Moderators: phranque
Technologically, the new modification of "Lovesan" is a copycat of the original. Slight changes were made only to the appearance of the worm: a new name of the main worm-carrier file (TEEKIDS.EXE instead of MSBLAST.EXE), a different method of code compression (FSG instead of UPX), and new "copyright" strings in the body of the worm abusing Microsoft and anti-virus developers.
I posted this in a new thread intentionally. Patch your systems! Fix information available in the previous thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]
I spent some time today emailing family members that are not very Internet savey about this worm and telling them how to download and install the patch. Anyone else, like me, that has family members with a cable/DSL connection really needs to be told that this patch is VERY important.
I was amazed that some of the people I wrote to today had not even heard of this new threat or thought it only effect ISP's and their servers.
It seems that it is not just high speed connections that are vulnerable. My lowly PC uses a dial-up connection, and I assumed that it was safe from worms. Mistake! A connection is a connection, whatever its speed.
A connection is a connection, whatever its speed.
While this is true for getting infected the results once you are infected can be very different.
I'm not sure of the situation in other countries, but here in NZ broadband nearly always has a data transfer cap (albiet a large one) while diaup is flat rate. So those of us on ADSL are particularly vulnerable. If I somehow got infected (which I won't, I'm patched) then, once the DDOS kicks in, the worm could sit here calling out over and over all the time through my always on connection and quickly run up a huge excess data bill. But if I had dialup then I would only be online when I was dialled in and plus data tranfer amounts wouldn't be an issue. It may cause problems for my ISP but wouldn't cost me anything.
I'm sure things are different in other parts of the world, but here this has been considered an important enough issue that I've had warning emails from both my ISP and the national ADSL provider, as well as seen several articles in the press aimed at broadband users.
The idea of contacting my family hadn't occured to me. I know several of them got stung by the last bug to do the rounds so I'm going to do that now. Thanks :D
here's the situation...
she's started a new job and they have given her a laptop loaded with win2k... she decided to visit the update site and found that there are 32 critical updates to be installed... she's done most all of them except that that tell her to back up the system... since its a laptop, she's not sure how or why it is necessary... i tried to explain that the OS is networking/server oriented and nothing like what she's used to with win9x... she says "but its a laptop!" the only really "critical" part is specialized software that her job is based around... it's pretty much nothing more than a database app...
so, what's the best recommendation to tell her? just go ahead and install the patches with backing up? back it up? back what up? should we just yank the drive out, clone it to one in a desktop machine, put it back then update?
that last is what i'd do if i was in that part of the industry like i used to be... i even tried to explain to her how because drives are so cheap these days, that folk do actually just go out and pick up a new 60gig or 80gig or whatever and use it as a backup media... of course, i got the "the average joe doesn't do that!" response...
the company she's working for doesn't even have an IT dept or anyone that's remotely close... they are all just pretty much users of the machine and generally only that stuff they need to be able to do their jobs...
arrrggghhh... all assistance is appreciated... sticky is fine or even a new thread in a forum that's more topical...
