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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Paul Sutton wrote: > > http://old.linuxworld.com.au/news.php3?nid=2020&tid=2 "that combines features from the well-known SirCam, Klez and Nimda worms." Yawn, more IT security company FUD. The recent MS SQL made all three of those look pretty pathetic in terms of time to spread, as infected machines just spat out infectious packets as fast as they could. And the MS SQL worm didn't carry a malicious payload. The worst we've seen from such attacks is a few ATM machines not working. Admittedly part of this is the writers were either not malicious enough, or attackers DoS'ed badly chosen targets - I mean fancy going for the root name servers, don't they have a clue? Compared to the risks from anthrax or smallpox, I think cyber warfare is really off the agenda, not that I want to breed complacency, but it is too unpredictable and the effects are not targetted very well. During the unoffical China/America cyber war, at least one virus delivered it's payload only when the appropriate country settings in windows were detected, but doing it to US/UK/English settings is going to cause unpredictable collateral damage. How long before the code is trapped, disassembled, the country settings changed, and every country is toast? I guess you could be more targetted if they went for a bug in AOL's software, although whether the user base would notice the difference... ;-) Whatever the consequences I just don't think it holds the public imagination to make it interesting to the average rogue state. I think virus/worm authoring will continue to be an activity for the bored, the antisocial, maladjusted or immature. As such the malware may crop up any time. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQE+amEBGFXfHI9FVgYRArvkAJ9g7Xp+2AmwgLXDdxNfsFXEjJFZSgCcDKHb Z9ioEQMX+DRTZm9zDjtP8ts= =XJyh -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe.