Microsoft Office Worm? (Feb2006)

[Darren Dirt]

Hey all!



Just wondering if any of you /.ers and the like have read any official word about some alleged worm I just heard about on TV this morning. It apparently will be launched today (Friday). Is it serious? Apparently the Microsoft official word is a patch won't be out until February 14th. Are

they serious? Or is there a patch out now? How does the worm do its nastiness? And most importantly, what versions of Office are vulnerable?

(At work it doesn't matter much to me, but at home I'm Office97 still so prolly safe, I hope...)

[Thorin]

From what I'd heard, this is a worm that is already in the wild (and has been out a coupel of weeks) that will be launching a DDoS attack today.  I think it's been named KamaSutra, Blackmail, and Blackworm.



Google News has more than a few links.



Do you have a virus scanner?  Are its virus definitions up-to-date?  If yes, you'll probably be alright.

[Mr. Analog]

It's all overblown, if you are retarded enough to open the attached zip file then you're going to get infected. This is just another worm like the Anna Kournakova one. Details on how to check if you've got it and what to do about it here.



Nothing to see here, move along.

[Thorin]

Speaking of worms, I just ran across a Wikipedia entry for the Internet Worm.



Dr. Morris was a visionary!

[Darren Dirt]

Speaking of worms, I just ran across a Wikipedia entry for the Internet Worm.



Dr. Morris was a visionary!

The defense against this was inspired by Michael Rabin's mantra, "Randomization." A certain fraction of the time, the worm would invade even if the target computer already claimed to have a copy. The bug was the fraction: 1 in 7. As Rabin remarked when he heard of the mistake, "He should have tried it on a simulator first."

[Lazybones]

Nope, haven't seen any, just lots of http://vil.nai.com/vil/content/v_128517.htm in my log today.