Slapper worm redux;

[Ron DuFresne <dufresne () winternet com>]

Those folks relying upon security through obscurity might well wish to get
on the ball and fully patch-up;


September 23 VNUNET.COM.
A suspect has been arrested on suspicion of authoring the Slapper worm.
But although the threat of the worm seems to have been short-lived, a new
variant is already set to take up where its predecessor left off. Although
the ISC's 'most attacked ports' chart no longer features Slapper in its
Top 10 a variant, Slapper.B, has been spotted in the wild. Slapper.B has
several subtle differences, but is for the most part an updated version of
its predecessor. Both worms attempt to exploit a known vulnerability in
the Secure Sockets Layer 2.0 (SSLv2) handshake process. The two variants
also carry the same payload, a password-protected backdoor and denial of
service (DoS) capabilities. ISS's Morgan said that with the new variant on
the loose his company had calculated that about 10,000 servers were
probably now infected, and that the network was probably going to be used
for DoS attacks. He added that it was unlikely the original author created
the second worm. "It was significant that source code for the original
Slapper was distributed within the computer underground immediately after
the worm was detected in the wild," he said. Source:
http://www.vnunet.com/News/1135274




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity.  It
eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." -- Johnny Hart
        ***testing, only testing, and damn good at it too!***

OK, so you're a Ph.D.  Just don't touch anything.