Sunday, November 9, 2008

History of Worm

Naming and history

The name worm comes from The Shockwave Rider, a science fiction novel published in 1975 by John Brunner[1][2].

Payloads

Many worms have been created which are only designed to spread, and don't attempt to alter the systems they pass through. However, as the Morris worm and Mydoom showed, the network traffic and other unintended effects can often cause major disruption. A "payload" is code designed to do more than spread the worm - it might delete files on a host system (e.g., the ExploreZip worm), encrypt files in a cryptoviral extortion attack, or send documents via e-mail. A very common payload for worms is to install a backdoor in the infected computer to allow the creation of a "zombie" under control of the worm author - Sobig and Mydoom are examples which created zombies. Networks of such machines are often referred to as botnets and are very commonly used by spam senders for sending junk email or to cloak their website's address.[3] Spammers are therefore thought to be a source of funding for the creation of such worms,[4][5] and worm writers have been caught selling lists of IP addresses of infected machines.[6] Others try to blackmail companies with threatened DoS attacks.[7]

Backdoors can be exploited by other malware, including worms. Examples include Doomjuice, which spreads better using the backdoor opened by Mydoom, and at least one instance of malware taking advantage of the rootkit and backdoor installed by the Sony/BMG DRM software utilized by millions of music CDs prior to late 2005.

Worms with good intent

Beginning with the very first research into worms at Xerox PARC there have been attempts to create useful worms. The Nachi family of worms, for example, tried to download and install patches from Microsoft's website to fix vulnerabilities in the host system — by exploiting those same vulnerabilities. In practice, although this may have made these systems more secure, it generated considerable network traffic, rebooted the machine in the course of patching it, and did its work without the consent of the computer's owner or user.

Other worms, such as XSS worms have been written for research to determine the factors of how worms spread, such as social activity and change in user behavior.

Still more worms do very little, or are pranks, such as one that sends the popular picture of the lolowl with the phrase "O RLY?" to a print queue in the infected computer.

Most security experts regard all worms as malware, whatever their payload or their writers' intentions.

Protecting against dangerous computer worms

Worms spread by exploiting vulnerabilities in operating systems. All vendors supply regular security updates[8] (see "Patch Tuesday"), and if these are installed to a machine then the majority of worms are unable to spread to it. If a vendor acknowledges a vulnerability but has yet to release a security update to patch it, a zero day exploit is possible. However, these are relatively rare.

Users need to be wary of opening unexpected email[9], and should not run attached files or programs, or visit web sites that are linked to such emails. However, as with the ILOVEYOU worm, and with the increased growth and efficiency of phishing attacks, it remains possible to trick the end-user into running a malicious code.

Anti-virus and anti-spyware software are helpful, but must be kept up-to-date with new pattern files at least every few days. The use of a firewall is also recommended.

In the April-June, 2008, issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, computer scientists describe a potential new way to combat internet worms. The researchers discovered how to contain the kind of worm that scans the Internet randomly, looking for vulnerable hosts to infect. They found that the key is for software to monitor the number of scans that machines on a network send out. When a machine starts sending out too many scans, it is a sign that it has been infected, allowing administrators to take it off line and check it for viruses.

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