Slammer Worm: A Blow to Remote Storage?

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://storage.ziffdavis.com/article2/0,3973,852392,00.asp

By David Morgenstern
January 30, 2003 

Stories of the SQL Slammer worm have disappeared from the front pages
of news sites, just a couple of days after its attack. "Out of sight,
out of mind," some may conclude with a sigh of relief. Still, folks in
the remote-storage business should be concerned about market fallout
from the Slammer worm.

As ably described by eWEEK, the weekend attack brought parts of the
Internet to virtual gridlock as the worm generated billions of bogus
packets. A wide sweep of Internet services was disturbed for millions
of users. (Or could it have been billions? After all, SQL Slammer
stopped Internet connections and telecommunications for an entire
country.) Several large ISPs were unreachable, and almost half the
Internet's root DNS servers were either completely disabled, or their
latency was so severe that they were effectively down.

For analysts, the pattern of the attack, its containment and the quick
rate of recovery all point to the resiliency of the Internet. From a
technologist's viewpoint, the news was good: Despite the increase in
load and stoppages here and there, the Internet bent but didn't break.

For consumers, however, this attack added yet more stress to their
wavering confidence in Internet-distributed content (that is, content
other than the "shared" music files that drive the RIAA wild). After
all, SQL Slammer is just the latest attack in a series—albeit one of
the worst yet.

We can only hope that consumer attitudes won't follow the three-strike
paradigm.

The industry's first strike was the collapse of the Internet bubble.  
During its heyday, many consumers uploaded personal photos and even
digital video files to remote-hosting services.

The Internet made it easy to share the family pictures with relatives
and friends, right? After the shakeup, a number of these companies
went under, and their customers lost their files. This loss lead
consumers to question the long-term viability of storage services.

Strike Two is this week's SQL Slammer attack, or perhaps some future
worm incident. The increasing severity of worm attacks on Internet
traffic (now involving telecommunications and banking services)  
weakens consumer confidence in the Internet itself. Consumers worry
that their access to Internet services could be compromised; the
perceived threat ranges from vital services such as e-mail to personal
items stored in remote servers.

Strike Three? I won't hazard a guess. Storage vendors can only hope
that consumer confidence in the Internet will continue to bend but not
break.


David Morgenstern is a longtime reporter of the storage industry as
well as a veteran of the dotcom boom in the storage-rich fields of
professional content creation and digital video.



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