Anatomy of Worms

[|The|Specialist]

Years ago the morris worm had thousands of PCs infected and there were even more paraniod PC users disconnecting their PCs from phonelines.

Here is a example of how worms function.

Like almost any evil code worms have active-X features which load the program and then mail the worm.

Code is attached to the main subprogram: Private Sub Form1_load then the attached code tells the computer to open, close, edit, & delete files.

Since worms mail themselves that means that even if the worm isn't deadly to PCs it can still mail itself and move in swarms intil it becomes a DoS attack on e-mail accounts.

You can prevent this by takeing a very close look at the programs you own and check for viruses and worms with anti-virus softwares.

[t2k2]

Thanks for the explanation. I think I would like to read more into it now. I don't mean that I want to create one or anything. It just seems interesting.

Thanks again.

[doktorf00bar]

Actually the Morris worm infected only Sun and VAX machines, not PCs.

[|The|Specialist]

This worm only enfected a few thousand I think but what you have to remember is how small the rate of computers and networks there where back then.

VAXes was used to hold large amounts of data.
You see, if it infected VAXes which was used heavly by large companies and goverment offices that means that this thing would have attacked FEDs and military peaple rather than the usual hotmail user.

It may not seem like much now compared to the code comeing out now days though.

[doktorf00bar]

Back in those days of yore(1988), most networking between UNIX machines involved trusted accounts in the hosts files. Meaning, that if my account was good on one university's machine, that generally meant I could jump unhindered to many other machines. It was this trusting paradigm that allowed the worm to eat up so much of the 'net. Today, most machines in important lynchpoints use a much more secure approach to authenticating users. The primary victim today is the home or office user, who left to their own devices generally follow no security policy at all.