N
net1
Guest
This week saw the arrival of Sasser, a new worm of the Don Johnson variety, complete with colourful shirt, shades, its own transportation and a VIP card to the most popular Windows applications. Its arrival on stage therefore received plenty of media coverage, most reports highlighting its potential to infect scores of computers worldwide.
The interesting thing about Sasser is precisely its reach and not so much what it does once it’s on your computer. It’s “all mouth and no trousers”, so to speak. Its main strength is that it spreads by relying on users doing absolutely nothing. There are no e-mails involved and no “click here if you want to be rich” tricks. It randomly selects poorly maintained machines without updated protection and enters through a security flaw in the Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.
In theory this shouldn’t cause the epidemic spread we are witnessing at the moment. Sasser will only affect computers which haven’t been patched and which don’t run an updated computer security program. The vast majority of pc users are, however, notoriously bad at keeping their pc’s patched up and many people think they’ll just “wait and see” if they really need an anti-virus program.
The interesting thing about Sasser is precisely its reach and not so much what it does once it’s on your computer. It’s “all mouth and no trousers”, so to speak. Its main strength is that it spreads by relying on users doing absolutely nothing. There are no e-mails involved and no “click here if you want to be rich” tricks. It randomly selects poorly maintained machines without updated protection and enters through a security flaw in the Windows 2000 and Windows XP operating systems.
In theory this shouldn’t cause the epidemic spread we are witnessing at the moment. Sasser will only affect computers which haven’t been patched and which don’t run an updated computer security program. The vast majority of pc users are, however, notoriously bad at keeping their pc’s patched up and many people think they’ll just “wait and see” if they really need an anti-virus program.
