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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