[extropy-chat] The emergence of AI

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sat, Dec 04, 2004 at 01:22:32PM +0100, Alfio Puglisi wrote:

> No, a computer virus requires manual intervention. What Keith was
> describing is more accurately called a "worm", which can infect hosts by
> itself.  It's probably the Code Red worm.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/sapphire/

Introduction

The Sapphire Worm was the fastest computer worm in history. As it began
spreading throughout the Internet, it doubled in size every 8.5 seconds. It
infected more than 90 percent of vulnerable hosts within 10 minutes.

The worm (also called Slammer) began to infect hosts slightly before 05:30
UTC on Saturday, January 25. Sapphire exploited a buffer overflow
vulnerability in computers on the Internet running Microsoft's SQL Server or
MSDE 2000 (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine). This weakness in an
underlying indexing service was discovered in July 2002; Microsoft released a
patch for the vulnerability before it was announced[1]. The worm infected at
least 75,000 hosts, perhaps considerably more, and caused network outages and
such unforeseen consequences as canceled airline flights, interference with
elections, and ATM failures. Several disassembled versions of the source code
of the worm are available. [2]. 

...

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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