Worm Book Post #5

Ending the book leaves the reader with a feeling of relief. The whole book towards the end builds up to the Conficker worm. At the end the Conficker worm ends up just to be a hoax, an April fools joke. There were three strains to the virus, A, B, and C. The strains of A, and B were predicted to be steps to take in order to unleash strain C, the heart of the worm. The public commotion that was caused because of this worm is something that should not be overlooked. What the worm still did caused panic and commotion between consumers, companies, and the government. A person suspected to be involved was Russian, but there are no leads on who it could be. The government should still be looking for the people responsible because of the public commotion these people caused and the amount of money the government spent on trying to protect the Internet and finding the people responsible. Microsoft is blamed for being the major problem on why the Conficker worm was such a threat. Microsoft is considered a monopoly for all the smaller companies they have bought. Microsoft took away the majority of the competition and have sold ten million computers with Windows operating system on them. Should companies be punished for wanting to make more of a profit? Without buying other companies, Microsoft would not have sold as many windows operating system computers. Another point that could be bought up is, with the mass making of windows computers the cost of the computer has been able to decrease, allowing more people to purchase a computer or have multiple computers. Corporations should not be blamed for wanting to sell as many products as possible. One thing to note when purchasing a product is the security. Apple computers are generally more expensive than windows computers but they are advertised to be more secure against viruses. By creating a common language among the larger computer companies more people have been able to create more programs for consumers to use. The drawback that is commonly overlooked is how it allows for more viruses to be made, and spread easily from computer to computer.

Worm Book Post #4

The fourth part of the book, Worm, starts out with talking about the Conficker worm. This was a virus no one knew the potential of. Not many people new the source of where the virus was even coming from. Mark writes about Rick, an online security expert, “Markoff quoted Rick: ‘If you’re looking for a digital Pearl Harbor, we now have the Japanese ships steering toward the horizon’” (Bowen, 129). The reason I choose this quote is to show how big of a deal Rick made of this event. I do not believe the public knew the threat level of the attack as Rick did. The Conficker worm spread fear through the online community of people who were following it for what the virus could do, the potential the worm had to destroy and steal information on so many computers. Businesses, like Microsoft, were also becoming worried of the Conficker worm affecting their computers, and offered a 250,000-dollar reward for whomever could identify the person or persons who created the worm. My question when I read how Microsoft was paying to have someone identify the person or persons who created the worm is, why is a company paying for the person identifying the worm, rather then the government taking more of an action to find the people responsible? The government was probably working very hard in order to find out who was behind the attack. This is especially after receiving advice on how bad the Conficker worm was going to be by online security experts. It does not seem right to have a company pay to help find the person or persons the government is looking for. Microsoft is paying in order to help keep their reputation of their operating system safe, but I still do not believe they should have to pay that much money to catch the people responsible.

Worm Book Post #3

In the third part of the book, Mark talks much more about the smaller viruses. Mark comes up with a creative tittle, “An Oceans of Suckers.” By smaller viruses what I really mean are viruses that target a lot of computers but do not cause physical harm. One virus, named Melissa virus, clogged networks by sending out pornographic images. The virus was able to spread itself by looking through peoples email addresses and then sending out emails to those people. This caused a lot of computers to receive this virus. The debate of this issue comes to play when you hear of the punishment. David Smith, the creator of this virus, was fined 5,000 dollars, and received twenty months in prison. Do you think this is a fair punishment? Is twenty months in prison enough, for someone who was able to access someone’s personal information? I personally do not think twenty months is enough for the crime that was committed. The virus this man made not only put a virus onto the computer, but it went through that person’s personal email and stole their email addresses. These types of email viruses continued and in 2000, a virus called I Love You was created. Two programming students in the Philippines created it.  The virus was designed to steal passwords from the victim’s personal files. While the virus failed it still managed to cause 5.5 billion dollars in damage. These email viruses were only just the beginning. Viruses were becoming more deadly towards computers some even targeting the main operating system and just shutting the computer down. What the significance of I Love You did was encouraged the bigger named companies to hire people to help find these security flaws in the operating system. Consumer confidence was going down, as consumers were unsure to open attached files in their emails. These email attacks and worm attacks were brought to an end in 2004 when Microsoft released Service Pack 2.

Worm Book Post #2

The second part of the book focuses much more on what the threats are of these viral security attacks. People underestimate the threats of these viral attacks, just because they are viral. In today’s society, everything is online. Someone who can break through the firewall of a business or country, “could compromise nuclear reactors, electrical grids, transportation networks, pipelines – you name it” (Bowden, 49).  The threats are just as real as an actual war. Even though the hacker is not holding a gun, he could be holding transportation codes allowing a tram to derail. I believe people do not understand how complex these security hacks can be. While some are as simple as a key tracker, meaning the virus tracks the key inputs in order to gain information like usernames and passwords, they can be as complex as causing physical harm to people. When talking about causing physical harm to people because of a computer, is the part of a computer virus I believe is overlooked. Once the virus enters into the computer, the virus is able to spread easily from one computer to another. For example, inside the windows operating system there is a feature called the Dynamic – Link Library. What this is designed to do is easily allow people to exchange data from one computer to another. What can also be sent through the computers is the virus. While the feature is designed to help the consumer, it can also hurt the consumer by spreading the virus through their other computers. This brought up another question to my mind. Should we be having these technologies being put into our computers? While this technology makes it very easy to send files, clearly it is not secure. Email has viruses attached but at least they know where the email is coming from when they open the attachment. Apple took a very interesting approach to help keep the computer safe from viruses. What apple requires is when sending a file from one computer to another is a passcode to send the file. While hackers are able to get around this, it takes much more effort and time to program, creating many less viruses able to attack the computer.

Worm Book Post #1

           In my class, we have started reading an outside reading book to help expand on an issue in America. When choosing the book I wanted to read, I decided to choose an issue that has not been given much focus recently. The book I decided to read was Worm by Mark Bowden. The premise of the story is to talk about various viruses and how they came to fame. The most recent and one of the largest computer virus is the Conficker worm. This is what computer security experts considered the First Digital World War. In the first part of the story, the book immediately pulls you in, posing questions and ideas of how a virus could come into play. Just on page 11 an interesting point was brought up. Mark talks about how computers used to be, where when large corporations would want a computer. The computers needed to be brought in to homes and businesses by removing the roof and dropping the computer in or by bringing the computer through a loading dock. What I found interesting about these older computers is how every computer was different. “Each machine had its own design and its own language and, once it had been put to work in a particular lab, its own culture, because each was programmed and managed to perform certain functions peculiar to the organization that bought it” (Bowden, 11). From reading this I thought to myself, has the modern day computer caused viruses to be spread throughout the world? Go back to when these computers had their own language, their own “personality,” the viruses would not be able to target millions of computers. Instead, these older computers would be the only ones with the virus leaving the virus stuck on one computer and not spreading to other computers. Now computers are massed produced with a similar operating system or language. The most popular, for example, is windows operating system. Computers are sent out with these operating systems so creating a virus for a particular operating system, now can affect millions of computers with that operating system. So basically to sum it up, rather then having one virus affect one computer, due to computers running the same language, one virus can affect millions of computers. Microsoft saw this flaw, and now has regular patches the first Tuesday of every month in order to help fix some of the flaws within the operating system. A group of Chinese hackers took advantage of a flaw within the windows operating system and started to make a business of selling an exploit. The exploit went to the heart of the windows operating system through a port known as port 445. Selling this product was not against the law since they were not performing any criminal acts. They were simply just selling the exploit. If they had added a virus to the exploit, then the result, on if it were a crime, would have been different. Another point could be brought up, should it be illegal to provide the tools to create these viruses? While the Chinese hacker group did not create the virus, only the exploit, they still helped aid in the assistance of the virus. Without the exploit the virus might not have been able to attack the computer. I personally believe there should be restrictions on who these exploits should be given to. If the exploit is put into the wrong hands, your personal information could be released to the public.


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