Please read AND HEED post #20.....thankyou.

Hey everyone, thanks for the info. I had a friend who uses dial up who was actually dinged by this and that link to that removal tool is exactly what she needed.

Thanks again!

… oh, and macrobaye, yes there have been serious holes in Apple and Linux products, I’ve patched a few of them myself. What you have to put into perspective is this: The number of virus writers is directly proportional to the number of people that the virus can affect. With the Windows operating system populating something like 90% (or higher) of the desktop market, there’s pretty much no reason to hunt down disruptive exploits that could be used in DoS style attacks because you’re not gonna get much notoriety with an audience that small, nor are you going to be able to make a huge impact with your DoS attack (or what have you) either. If either Apple or Linux had the bazillion users that Windows did than I’d bet everything that I own that you’d see some pretty serious exploits found there as well, because you’d have hundreds of thousands (millions ?) of would-be hackers and script kiddies hunting this stuff down on a daily basis like we see in the Windows environment.

Actually, it seems this worm was intentionally written to promulgate quickly and gather attention, likely to make a very noticeable point about the RPC vulnerability rather than bring down the net (although evidently some cable companies had some of their equipment hit and outages resulted). Unlike malware previously spotted on the net which exploits this same vulnerability and was propagating slowly under the public's radar. Clearly this worm could have done something far more malicious to its victims' systems had the designer wanted it to.

With the other exploits already in the wild but moving slowly, those who went without firewalls and were unpatched could blithely go on without any notice that there was a real threat sneaking up on them. This msblaster (aka lovesan) brought a rather noticeable end to many people's unawareness of this vulnerability and the need to get patched and protected (some sort of port filter).

As one of the early spotters and identifiers of msblaster noted, this worm blew the cover under which other similar exploits were going unnoticed except by some security professionals. And some think that was quite intentional and a part of the point the designer wished to make.

Now far more people are aware and patched. Because no doubt this won't be the last time that such an exploit will be attempted and next time the malware may not be as "benign" toward its victim's PC's or the internet.

Moderator hat on.....

 

Please stay on topic.

 

Moderator hat off.

 

[this is supposed to work...but I'm yet to be convinced]

i'm just gonna shut up, seeing that no one really cares what other people with conflicting wiews say. If it doesn't follow the norm, them ignore it...right? that's your philosophy? anyways, this will be my last post in this thread on one condition:

If I see anything like "thank god" or anything demeaning towards me or what I posted, I will be forced to back up what I said. So it is now up to all of you whether to stay on topic, or to rile me up a bit. choose wisely.

I'm locking this thread. 

The personal attacks have gone on too long.

To everyone involved, please refrain from this in the future.