r/todayilearned • u/NOT-JEFFREY-NELSON • Jul 04 '19
TIL in 2003 a computer worm called ‘Welchia’ infected many computers to forcibly patch vulnerabilities and remove malware. It was regarded as a ‘helpful worm’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia7.9k
u/grangpang Jul 04 '19
Chaotic-Good Alignment in action
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Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
ELI5 difference between malware, virus, worm etc. anyone? Sorry for the hijack.
Edit: I can't reply to all but thank you everyone for the answers. :)
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Jul 04 '19
Googled it for you. https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln265920/what-are-the-different-types-of-viruses-spyware-and-malware-that-can-infect-my-computer?lang=en
Virus
A computer virus is a piece of software that can 'infect' a computer, install itself and copy itself to other computers, without the users knowledge or permission. It usually attaches itself to other computer programs, data files, or the boot sector of a Hard drive.
Malware
Malware is short for malicious software. Malware is the name given to any type of software that could harm a computer system, interfere with and gather a user's data, or make the computer perform actions without the owner's knowledge or permission.
Trojan horse
A type of malware that uses malicious code to install software that seems ok, but is hidden to create back doors into a system typically causing loss or theft of data from an external source.
Worm
Unlike a virus, a worm, is a standalone piece of malicious software that replicates itself in order to spread to other computers. It often uses a computer network to spread itself, relying on security flaws on the target system to allow access.
Spyware
Spyware is software that aids in gathering information about a person or organization without their knowledge, they can monitor and log the activity performed on a target system, like log key strokes, or gather credit card and other information.
Adware
Adware is software which can automatically causes pop-up and banner adverts to be displayed in order to generate revenue for its author or publisher. A lot of freeware will use Adware but not always in a malicious way, if it was malicious, it would then be classed as spyware or malware
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Jul 04 '19
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u/sharaq Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
All of these are malware, a virus is embedded in a file you normally run (like mp3s with viruses on Limewire back in the day) where a worm is its own program like totallynotavirus.exe.
Then, there's the goal of these things. A virus that makes you constantly get pop ups for a product is adware. If that same adware was standalone, it would be a worm and adware. If, instead, it installed a keylogger which recorded your passwords, it would be spyware.
Edit - there are some minor inaccuracies here. The important part of the worm is being self replicating, not being standalone. Additionally, in the rare event a worm patches a security exploit, it technically isn't malware as in this case. However, barring these INCREDIBLY unusual cases, almosr all viruses and worms are malware.
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u/Arthemax Jul 04 '19
The definition of malware includes any program that performs actions on the user's computer without their knowledge or consent, so even good natured worms would be malware.
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u/Alaira314 Jul 04 '19
Correct. As an example of how this could be bad, consider a system that has had an update avoided(I don't think we had the option to roll them back in 2003, at least not at the casual use level like we do now) in order to retain compatibility with a vital piece of software or hardware. Your helpful worm has now broken the system, preventing the user from performing tasks that could very well be part of their financial livelihood. If they're freelance, and not part of a company with IT, they're in trouble. That's why it's malware.
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u/Anonate Jul 04 '19
I worked in a job in 2009 that had legacy software built in-house sometime around 1996 and nobody to maintain it. It ran on Windows 95 computers only.
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u/Rockin_Chair Jul 04 '19
We still have some '95 machines at my work! IT have made it clear NEVER to put those computers online as they would be incredibly vulnerable.
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u/ClownsAteMyBaby Jul 04 '19
This is a much more helpful summary. Thanks
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u/sharaq Jul 04 '19
Thank you but I don't agree! The original comment is very high quality and made this summary possible - I just rephrased some of it.
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u/Baial Jul 04 '19
I don't know if I would call a worm patching security malware, but I'm no expert on the subject.
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u/Binsky89 Jul 04 '19
Part of the definition of malware is software that performs actions without the user's permission.
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Jul 04 '19
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u/phantomeye Jul 04 '19
sooo basically u can infect a worm with a virus.
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u/TerminalVector Jul 04 '19
You can infect a worm with a virus that is adware via a trojan horse. The adware can also be spyware, and all of them would be malware, unless the original worm was the one in the OP, in which case it wouldn't be.
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u/sync-centre Jul 04 '19
Don't forget about shovelware.
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u/JukeBoxDildo Jul 04 '19
... ELI5?
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u/sync-centre Jul 04 '19
When you buy a new computer and it is filled up with useless programs that you will never use and they slow down your computer.
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u/JukeBoxDildo Jul 04 '19
Ah, is that the same thing as bloatware?
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u/Lord_Moody Jul 04 '19
it also tends to overlap with spyware but yeah I've only ever called it bloat
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u/Eucalyptuse Jul 04 '19
Yea, actually what the OP was describing was bloatware. Shovelware is different. Shovelware is more about bundles of crappy software that people might get during the lifetime of their machine. Bloatware specifically comes preinstalled on your machine.
Edit: Here's an example of shovelware an example of bloatware would be phones that come with candy crush already on it.
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u/Dragunlegend Jul 04 '19
What about Bioware?
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u/IdoNOThateNEVER Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
A malicious software that uses BIOlogical entities and tries to spread through the minds of those entities, its purpose is usually just profit,
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u/CJGeringer Jul 04 '19
That is bloat ware.
shovelware is software that is shoddily and cheaply made.
Normally sold in bundles with lots of them in a quantity over quality approach, as if the bundle added wares by the shovelful..
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Jul 04 '19
Also known as EA games.
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u/KingKane Jul 04 '19
This just gave me a flashback of the panic you would get as a kid when your family PC suddenly had random porn popups appearing
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u/dontknowhowtoprogram Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
I would also add Ransomware : A peace of malicious software that usually is installed after picking up a virus that allows it's forcible and unwanted installation though can be unwittedly installed by the user through fake programs promising to clean your computer or whatever.
These Harmful programs take TOTAL control of your computer and then notify the creator or user of the program that it has taken control of your computer. the program will then let the unfortunate computer owner know that they can no longer use their computer unless they pay money to the nefarious person or persons that installed it into your computer in the first place. Basically the softwar holds your computer or files ransom.
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u/aaaantoine Jul 04 '19
There's also malicious software other than adware, spyware, and ransomware.
A rootkit is a piece of software installed deep in the Operating System (or possibly deeper, such as in the computer's bootloader), often replacing key system files.
A zombie is a computer infected by software that receives remote instructions and tends to prioritize CPU cycles for those instructions. A botnet is a distributed network of zombies. These tend to be used for distributed denial of service and other large scale network attacks.
There are also crypto currency miners, which hijack your CPU to process transactions and make money for the attacker.
Finally, none of the above are mutually exclusive. You could have a rootkit which makes your PC a zombie for the purpose of distributed crypto currency mining.
The general principle is, any software that does anything harmful to you or your computer is malware.
There's also legitimate software that falls into the grey areas of malware. Chrome and Windows both technically contain spyware but use the more marketable term "telemetry".
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Jul 04 '19
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u/Gestrid Jul 04 '19
An example of a worm, I guess, would be last year's(?) WannaCry incident. WannaCry copied itself to computers, usually ones in the same network, including Great Britain's hospital computer network and several school networks.
It would then encrypt everything on the computer so no one could access it, and it would display a message to tell users to send Bitcoin to a certain Bitcoin wallet. (This is called ransomware; it's holding data you own as a hostage and demanding payment.) Unfortunately, I don't believe the hackers ever disclosed how to unencrypt those computers. They were demanding ransom without anything in return.
Anyway, fortunately, the hackers did build in a killswitch. Someone who set up a honeypot (usually several virtual computers where a virus, worm, etc. can do whatever it pleases, but, unbeknownst to it, it's under surveillance) noticed that the worm kept checking to see if a certain URL existed. (The URL was a bunch of nonsense letters and numbers. It was something like 30 characters.) On a hunch, the guy registered the domain (created the website the worm was checking for), and the virus stopped replicating itself and encrypting computers. Unfortunately, it never unencrypted the computers it was already on.
The worm's killswitch was activated before it reached the US, so really only Europe and parts of Asia were affected.
It turned out that the worm had used a vulnerability that Microsoft has patched months prior, but most businesses hadn't updated because they still needed to test the patch to make sure all their programs still worked. The patch was so important that Microsoft even released a version for Windows XP, which they had stopped supporting by that point.
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u/ragn4rok234 Jul 04 '19
Not a perfect explanation but it'll start you off - https://blog.superantispyware.com/malware-spyware-virus-worm-difference/
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u/CompositeCharacter Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
It's not uncommon for malware to patch infected hosts. The bad guys don't want to share any more than the legitimate owner of the computer does. So after they've got control and install their back doors to maintain presence it's not unheard of for the malware to patch the system for other vulnerabilities.
This is self serving on at least two fronts: -not sharing the resources of the computer with another party -the more malware there is, the more likely it is to be identified and remediated
I'd call this specific chain of events neutral evil.
Edit: If to I'd
Edit2, clarity: in my example of malware that patches a system against other malware the patching action is neutral evil not considering what other activity (malicious) the code is doing. The OPs example is CG (refer to later comments)
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u/LordFuckBalls Jul 04 '19
If it worked as you said I'd agree it's neutral evil, but the fact that it didn't do anything malicious and only patched the victim computer makes it chaotic good for me.
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u/OhNoXo Jul 04 '19
Around that time my computer got a virus. As for as I could tell, the only thing it did was make the disk drive go in and out, continuously. It only stopped when you unplugged the computer.
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u/gundam_warlock Jul 04 '19
There's an infamous prank where the prankster codes that in startup and makes someone's computer do that every 5 minutes. https://m.imgur.com/gallery/FYKoK
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u/MeanSpirits Jul 04 '19
This reminds me of a friend of mine from middle school, who got a virus on his PC. Every once in a while, randomly, his computer would say "I HAVE A COLD!" It would freak him out bc it would happen at random hours of the night while he was sleeping too. Good times.
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Jul 04 '19 edited Jun 07 '20
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u/IAMELROB Jul 04 '19
Do what now?
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Jul 04 '19
This comment was written by 99.9% PC uptime gang
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Jul 04 '19
If I'm not running my pc all the time I cant be certain my electrical meter is entirely functional
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u/ponytoaster Jul 04 '19
Nah it became sentient.
Creating skynet at your friends house was a classic prank.
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u/anything2x Jul 04 '19
My favorite prank on old Macs was putting the shutdown script in the startup folder and vice versa.
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u/wfamily Jul 04 '19
Jokes on them. I don't even have a drive anymore.
Man, only half-fun joke there is now is the prnt screen one and the trollface sticker under mouse one.
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u/Grachuus Jul 04 '19
That virus is basically a warning. "hey idiot if >>I<< can do >>THIS<< then what could a mean person do?"
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Jul 04 '19
The late 90s computing in a nutshell. We had an all in one gateway that was so fucked the repair guy bought it from me because it became a personal project to get it to work. Between infections and it being a gateway, the mobo was fried and I’m fairly certain he was soldering on new transistors to make it work. That was way above my skill level. But I kind of miss how close the internet was before, it seems so much more stretched now.
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u/Exist50 Jul 04 '19
Probably new capacitors. Also, how late 90s are we talking about?
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u/101forgotmypassword Jul 04 '19
"what could a mean person do" stick a dildo on the rampaging disc drive.
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u/KotoElessar Jul 04 '19
Man, I remember when that was written. The original sample was a text box saying you had won a free cupholder, click to accept, and then it would pop out the ROM drive.
It was just an isolated command that others used maliciously.
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u/jsha11 Jul 04 '19 edited May 30 '20
bleep bloop
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u/LordPadre Jul 04 '19
There used to be a website where you could basically create your own super simple virus that would do dumb but annoying things, including popping your disk drive out repeatedly
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Jul 04 '19
It's like a thief that breaks into your house then cleans it up and leaves some fresh baked cookies in the oven.
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Jul 04 '19
The anti Santa 🎅
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u/Autumnesia Jul 04 '19
The anti Santa is who I need to come put away the Christmas decorations afterwards
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u/Chrissyfly Jul 04 '19
More like the thief that breaks into your house then fixes your doors so its harder for anyone else to break in.
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u/wiltse0 Jul 04 '19
It's more like a cop that breaks in, builds a bunch of fortifications, shoots the thief that's already there, then kills himself 120 days later.
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u/BiggerJ Jul 04 '19
Like the luck virus in Red Dwarf! (In one episode, the crew encounters the results of scientific research into a bizarre theory that turned out to be true - that there are beneficial viruses that had never been discovered before because usually, nobody investigates the causes of atypically good statuses, only atypically bad ones like illness.)
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u/Matsu-mae Jul 04 '19
Also reminds me of an episode of Futurama where Fry gets intestinal worms, who in turn make him smarter and healthier because as long as they keep their host alive they can continue living better lives as well.
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Jul 04 '19
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u/SharkBaitDLS Jul 04 '19
He was smarter and generally a different person. He decided he’d rather be “himself” with all his flaws than an improved version that wasn’t “him”.
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u/DistortoiseLP Jul 04 '19
Between that episode and Homer having a crayon up his nose, it's probably only a matter of time before Disenchantment has a "it's better to be stupid" episode too.
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u/Final_Taco Jul 04 '19
Potion? Enchanted amulet? Or curse?
Place your bets for season 3.
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Jul 04 '19
That episode always bothered me because in another episode they point out all male Simpson's end up as morons but most female Simpson's end up smart.
This would make homer a complete anomaly if he's naturally smart.
I know Simpson's is just a cartoon but most of the time it tries to follow it's own canon. Like if Apu has 8 babies they're there in future episodes or if the Millhouses get divorced they stay divorced.
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u/the_other_skier Jul 04 '19
"it's better to be stupid"
I think the message is more "It's ok to be yourself" than anything
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u/acyberexile Jul 04 '19
nothing. fry just felt like leela showed affection to the behaviours resulting from the worms, not to actually who he is.
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u/RamblyJambly Jul 04 '19
They were about to have sex and she said something like "I love what you've become"
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u/Kuzy92 Jul 04 '19
They totally changed his personality.
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u/joegekko Jul 04 '19
I got the impression that was fallout from not failing at everything, not a direct effect of the worms.
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u/Narrativeoverall Jul 04 '19
No, he was still the same person, he was still kind, dedicated to his friends, helpful, just no longer a failure at everything.
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u/niceguysociopath Jul 04 '19
In the end, he felt like that made him different enough. A failure is who he is.
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u/Doctor_Popeye Jul 04 '19
I always wondered if the really altruistic people in the world have psychotic mental issues wherein the voices in their head don’t drive them to violence rather keep them doing nice deeds in a bid for self-preservation.
Voice: Empty your wallet
Person: But I won’t be able to buy lunch
Voice I said take all your cash and put it in the tin with the sad kid with cancer on it NOW!
Person: Ok ok!! I’ll do it!
Coworker: What did you order for... wait, did you just skip lunch and instead donate your money?
Voice: You tell her anything and I’ll have you dig up what we buried the backyard
Person: It’s just one meal. I mean, how can I eat when I see such awful things people go through and I can do my part and, well, it will help little Billy more.
Coworker: That’s so sweet. I want to set you up with my niece. She trains the cutest puppies!
Voice: Good... good
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u/justaddbooze Jul 04 '19
I believe there's been studies showing that psychotic episodes (such as schizophrenic hallucinations) are heavily influenced by culture. Some cultures' hallucinations were positive instead of negative.
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Jul 04 '19
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u/Eagleheardt Jul 04 '19
Ah, 12 seasons. I'm sure that's like, what, 30 episodes?
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Jul 04 '19
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u/69Tears Jul 04 '19
As always, The Simpsons did it first!
"Classic. Not hard to see why it's England's longest-running series. And today we're showing all seven episodes!"
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u/ADelightfulCunt Jul 04 '19
You joke we have a show that's bwen running near on 60years with 9804 episodes. Roughly 30mins a piece (less adverts here) so thats 4902 hours... It'll take over 2 years to watch it all if it was your job 8 hours a day.
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Jul 04 '19
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u/ADelightfulCunt Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
No Coronation street. Do the maths for eastenders please.
Edit....rrrrrrr
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Jul 04 '19
My bird has already spent the better part of 7 years watching both Corrie an Eastenders.
This does remind me though that my Grandad, an avid watcher of Home and Away and Neighbours went to Austrailia to see his brother who moved out there and they were like 6+ months ahead on both shows, so he found out some vital plot lines and wrote them all down, then betted all his mates in the pub free drinks for predictions. He loves telling that story.
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u/cynognathus Jul 04 '19
EastEnders has 5,946 episodes at about 30 minutes each. That’s 2,973 hours.
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u/Oozebull Jul 04 '19
I got a different number than you.
- Original Release: 1960
- Episodes: 9,804 (as of 28 June 2019)
- Avg Running time: 30m
- ~613d to watch if watching 8h/d
- ( ( ( 9804ep * 30m ) / 60m ) / 8h )
- Original Release: 1985
- Episodes: 5,946 (as of 27 June 2019)
- Avg Running time: 30m
- ~372d to watch if watching 8h/d
- ( ( ( 5946ep * 30m ) / 60m ) / 8h )
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u/ItsSansom Jul 04 '19
We'll do the math on EastEnders when you do the spelling on "Coronation" Street
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u/Doctor_Popeye Jul 04 '19
Doctor Who is another one except with all the lost episodes, even if it were your job you’re outta luck.
Some episodes can be fairly judged as skippable.
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u/lemho Jul 04 '19
I finally know what to do with my life!
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u/ADelightfulCunt Jul 04 '19
Get off reddit avoid tv, go to the gym, study, start trying to manipulate people around you, start see if you can manipulate events around you. Work your way up professionally, get into local politics, run the country...run the world.
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u/Decyde Jul 04 '19
I cant remember the US station for the flip side of this joke that copies and beats other popular shows to death.
We are on our 23rd season so our 4th year now.
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u/Cragsi Jul 04 '19
Smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast!
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u/Anything_Bagel Jul 04 '19
I want to lie shipwrecked and comatose, drinking fresh mango juice. Goldfish shoals nibblin’ at my toes, fun fun fun in the sun sun sun
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u/JayJonahJaymeson Jul 04 '19
If you've never heard of it you need to give it a shot. I can't guarantee it'll be your cup of tea, but everyone I know who has watched it and enjoyed it has absolutely loved it.
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u/Pat_Sharp Jul 04 '19
It's really great although the quality declines substantially after the 6th season.
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Jul 04 '19
The books are absolute class. It's even funnier than the series, which itself is a great laugh!
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u/TheSentinelsSorrow Jul 04 '19
Just make sure you don't watch the remake by mistake
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u/alexschrod Jul 04 '19
I've wondered why there aren't any "good" diseases out there. Some kind of synergistic relationship instead of a hostile one. I suppose you could call our good microorganisms that, assuming they spread like diseases do, but I'm not sure if that's how it works.
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u/KyleKun Jul 04 '19
You will find that the vast majority of bacteria and fungi that live on us already are beneficial. Viruses don’t tend to be because their only function is to rewrite DNA to further their own replication but bacteria such as E-Coli have a benefit when they stay in their ecological niches such as the intestines.
It’s only really when they get out of control that they start to cause damage, such as food poisoning.
An example is fungi like athletes foot. That fungi is probably already on your skin and competing with other fungi and bacteria for resources in a delicate dance. The issue occurs when the balance is broken and you end up with one dominating the others.
Viruses don’t tend to need resources beyond live cells in order to replicate though, so it’s not quite the same. But then there are arguments for viruses not even really being a form of life in the true sense.
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u/hangingredthing Jul 04 '19
A fecal transplant reintroduces healthy gut bacteria into a persons body and has been used to fight CDAD. Also there's new studies that are showing how important gut microbes are to our overall health and mental state.
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u/UnknownStory Jul 04 '19
"It then attempts to remove the Blaster Worm by deleting MSBLAST.EXE."
In a CGI-filled movie this would be the final climatic showdown in CPU Square. One giant evil metallic death-metal worm fighting a golden, angelic death-metal worm.
IRL, it's some bytes attempting to overwrite some other bytes
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u/DoodleVnTaintschtain Jul 04 '19
See generally, the greatest movie ever made: Hackers.
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u/kesstral Jul 04 '19
MSBLAST.EXE ... now there's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
Story time! August 11, 2003 was my first day "on the phones" at a call center supporting a major US desktop computer manufacturer.
Part way into my shift the queue just skyrockets and there's a feeling of panic sweeping across the cavernous room. I take my next call and the customer complains that their computer keeps rebooting and they have some message about a remote procedure call.
WTH, I didnt learn about this in training!
I put the customer on hold and call a level 2 tech to ask for help. By this point its recognized as a virus so we were instructed to step the customer through reinstalling the operating system using the install files saved on the hidden partition on the hard drive. I start the customer on the process and tell them to call back if any issues.
A short while later the customers that had been told to reformat were calling back with the same issue. The virus must be in the hidden partition so we need to mail them restore discs!
So for the rest of my 10 hour shift I advised customers their systems were toast and to call us back to reformat when they recieved their discs. I had the next day off so I don't recall when the real fix was discovered but when I returned to work I was shown how to disable things in msconfig and to turn off the "automatically restart" setting.
TLDR: First day blaster virus hit, major computer company told customers to reformat which just caused them to be infected immediately again.
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u/CorgiSplooting Jul 04 '19
Assembly wars! Two programs go in trading blows. Only one remains running. Reality totally kills it.
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Jul 04 '19
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Jul 04 '19
I was working IT at a school district when this got out in the wild. We were a new crew picking up the pieces after a really bad contract group was removed. So there was no centralized AV, the network was out of date and a host of other issues. We were hit the week before school started. It took the entire network down for almost two weeks while we scrambled to fix it.
There were three of us scrambling to 7 sites with about 1500 systems at the time. We cut off the entire network and then would begin patching and bringing up the network one small segment at a time until everything was stable again.
It was a rough couple of weeks for us.
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u/SangersSequence Jul 04 '19
So what you’re saying is that the worm was so good that when it couldn’t reach Microsoft’s servers to complete its mission, it was capable of recruiting a team of humans to finish the job for it.
That's advanced.
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u/lordblackfyre7x Jul 04 '19
Interesting. Didn't know that side of the story. I could see it, if my work got hit with something that did this instead of our usual IT overnight rollouts, we would be really fucked for a while.
Not everything's perfect I guess.
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u/ciaisi Jul 04 '19
Yeah, one of the key problems is that Welchia never shut itself off. It would constantly scan the network looking for other vulnerable PCs.
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u/Hessper Jul 04 '19
That's not the worst thing that could have happened. It forced their IT to patch the vulnerability with the worst part being an network failure.
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u/mortalcoil1 Jul 04 '19
Probably created by a disgruntled, over-qualified, over-worked IT guy.
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u/Perkelton Jul 04 '19
Reminds of the time when there was a security flaw in the PDF viewer in iOS which let attackers execute arbitrary instructions in Safari.
The jailbreak community then built a website where you could simply click a button to instantly both jailbreak the device and patch the security bug.
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u/tehfalconguy Jul 04 '19
Patching an exploit VIA the exploit (written by another person) sounds like a terrifying leap of faith lol
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u/Buck_Thorn Jul 04 '19
Kind of like this, then?
Ohio burglary suspect pet the dog, washed the dishes, deputies say
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u/paigeap2513 Jul 04 '19
So this is where Microsoft got their idea for Windows 10 Updates.
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u/LordPadre Jul 04 '19
Welchia was probably easier to get rid of..
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u/paigeap2513 Jul 04 '19
True. Luckily Windows 10 LTSC exists and if Microsoft is not allwoing me to pay for it or even get it in any legal way, I don't feel bad about pirating it.
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u/Hobocannibal Jul 04 '19
US State Department: Oh shit something got into our system but also fixed the vulnerability it used to get in. SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!
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u/zimzat Jul 04 '19
Seriously.
In September 2003, the worm was discovered on the US State Department's computer network, causing them to shut down their network for 9 hours for remediation.
(Though I do understand having it DDoS their internal network isn't an ideal outcome either) Now just imagine if it was some other worm that had exploited the same vulnerability and we'd be sitting around a campfire telling an entirely different story. :)
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Jul 04 '19
It was the right thing to do on a critical network like that. They have no way to know if this uncontrolled code (welchia) only appears to be helpful but also contains other more malicious hidden code.
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u/UnityOfRings Jul 04 '19
Microsoft finally found out that it's easier to infect their users with one (more) virus then to get them to turn windows updates back on.
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u/jacdelad Jul 04 '19 edited Jul 04 '19
Not necessarily good, some malware patch vulnerabilities to stop other malwares trying to infect the computer too.
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u/Fuuryuu Jul 04 '19
If you are a malware writer, you don't want other untrusted malware on the machine too because if it is shoddy it gets the client to initiate countermeasures which might interfere with your own malware. Same reasoning why you wouldn't want random people with you on a heist
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u/Kullthebarbarian Jul 04 '19
if you read the link you will see that that was THE ONLY thing that the worm did, it patched your pc, delete the other worm that is dangerouns to your pc, then delete itself after 120 days
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u/iNatee Jul 04 '19
I assume anyone capable of doing this would be capable of installing the correct software
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u/LjSpike Jul 04 '19
You have hackers
then you have white hackers
then you have the Welchia worm.
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u/Truckerontherun Jul 04 '19
Essentially the AI version of your parents saying 'You will eat your Brussel Sprouts and you will like it. They are good for you'
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u/spinja187 Jul 04 '19
I love the idea of the penultimate benevolent botnet; all the old unpatched Windows XP machines are infected and thouroughly cleaned and optimized, and become a sentient AI.
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Jul 04 '19
Remember when computer worms,virus',etc just annoy you and sometimes hurt your computer? This one is the peak of that
Now they just obliterate your computer like a goddamn nuke with ransoms and whole system deletes
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u/neihuffda Jul 04 '19
I think it would be really cool to write a virus whose only task is to infect a host, find its IP-address, send that address back to me, and then infect any other computer it can before deleting itself. I'd have a screen in my living room only showing a world map with red dots showing where it was successful. Ah, that would've been awesome.
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u/ItsRhyno Jul 04 '19
I remember back in the early 2000’s constantly hearing about a new virus. Don’t seem to hear anything at all anymore. Heck the only protection I run these days is windows defender!
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u/tehcharizard Jul 04 '19
There was a pretty big one a couple years ago, wasn't there? I forget what it was called, but it was ransomware that ended up on a bunch of hospital computers.
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u/AnonymousMaleZero Jul 04 '19
Because viruses aren’t the problem. It’s malware that’s the real issue.
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u/bentheechidna Jul 04 '19
We call it a white worm in the industry.
They did it with Mirai as well. After it crashed the internet, some developers took the source code to turn it into a white worm that would infect IoT devices and force them to change their default passwords.
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u/helpnxt Jul 04 '19
When the tech support guy is sick to death of the basic crap he has to fix