[extropy-chat] Wow! The world of worms

Amara Graps amara at amara.com
Fri Aug 19 07:42:16 UTC 2005


Last week I was in London for a few days visiting with my parents before
they travelled on to Latvia. One of the cool things we did as tourists
was to visit the London zoo. The London zoo has, among many exhibits
a magnificent insect exhibit. It is housed in a roundish glass building,
inside and outside, walking through the circular corridors you learn
about the large bio-mass to which the insect world contributes on
our planet earth. I did not find a good Web site to describe this
interesting exhibit but, here is the main site:
ttp://www.zsl.org/london-zoo/

While I was looking at worms at the zoo, worms were affecting me
at home. The Internet kind. My spam filter (spambouncer) hung, and
after a debugging effort to learn  what happened, I read that it was
probably due to a worm, causing some unnecessarily large CPU (forking).
I think that this is the  first time that spambouncer has ever been
externally affected by the virus world (and it has caught _all_ of
the viruses).

http://www.spambouncer.org/whatsnew.shtml#20050816

8/16/2005

"Today's SpamBouncer releases are to patch a fairly serious problem in
both the beta and production release. One version of the Mitglieder.EO
worm is causing Procmail hangs in previous versions of SpamBouncer due
to some strange formatting. These hangs eat up a lot of CPU time and
slow email processing significantly. Everyone should update ASAP."

----------

Another news note regarding worms is this: Worm Wars!

from Boing boing:

"Internet worms attack each other to build massive botnets
This week's storm of Windows worms is compounded by the fact that rival
botnet gangs have written worms that attack each other, targetting
one-another's compromised zombies and converting them to part of their
own botnets.

"We seem to have a botwar on our hands," Hypponen said Wednesday. "There
appear to be three different virus-writing gangs turning out new worms
at an alarming rate, as if they were competing to build the biggest
network of infected machines."

The first worm, dubbed Zotob, appeared on Sunday and appeared to have
faded Monday. However, several Zotob offshoots and another new worm,
Bozori, were subsequently unleashed. New versions of pre-existing
threats Rbot, Sdbot, CodBot and IRCBot also began wriggling their way
into computers. Systems at CNN, ABC and The New York Times were hit."
    
Watch out for worm wars
http://news.com.com/Watch+out+for+worm+wars/2100-7349_3-5837147.html
-- 

********************************************************************
Amara Graps, PhD          email: amara at amara.com
Computational Physics     vita:  ftp://ftp.amara.com/pub/resume.txt
Multiplex Answers         URL:   http://www.amara.com/
********************************************************************
"What is important is to spread confusion, not to eliminate it."
   -- Salvador Dalí




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