Re: Benign Worms

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Fri, 13 May 2005 11:13:03 CDT, k k said:

> There is debate surrounding whether releasing benign worms such as Nachi or 
> Welcha, in general is ethical or not.  But network administrators can still 
> create benign worms for their need (not necessarily Nachi or Welcha) and 
> release them in their domain to patch systems.
>
> 1. Do people do that?  Or at least, have you considered it?

I doubt anybody seriously considers it

> 3. If not, what prevents you from doing that?

There's 3 basic setups:

1) You don't have a lot of machines.  You don't *need* a worm to update 5 or 10
boxes, just walk to each and do it.

2) You have a lot of machines that aren't under your direct administrative control
(for example, an ISP or a university).  You can't deploy a worm, because those
boxes aren't yours to screw around with - worming them could get you arrested
for hacking and/or end up liable for any damages caused if a machine glitches
during the patch.

3) You have a lot of machines under your control that you need to update.
You don't need a worm - there's plenty of tools like "Push an update via
an AD policy" and so on, and you should be using those.

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