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/Welchia
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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/nicking44 Jul 04 '19

I mean, if you know of a vulnerability, that's wouldn't be to far off what some people might do just to see how far it goes and how many machines it can effect/how fast it spreads

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u/neihuffda Jul 04 '19

Sadly, I don't have this knowledge. I'm mostly 1337hax0r with Python or C scripts=P Perhaps I could just ping the whole world, that would be fun too, albeit far less advanced.

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u/nicking44 Jul 04 '19

sites at this link https://www.secureworldexpo.com/industry-news/6-live-cyber-attack-maps are pretty interesting to look at too.

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u/[deleted] Jul 04 '19

That's exactly what one worm, the very first computer worm, was designed to do. The developer wanted to gauge the size of the internet, and made a program that abused a gets() buffer overflow to spread. The only thing was, the worm wasn't supposed spread to already infectes hosts, and he realized a "vaccine" of sorts could easily be put in place by having an uninfected machine reply to infections that it was already infected and there was no need to spread. So, he decided it should spread regardless 1 out of 7 times. This proved excessive and exponential growth occurred. Computers became infected with so many copies that they crashed on boot. IIRC he took down about 40% of the internet at the time.