[ISN] What's the difference between a viral attack and a scan?

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 22:19:41 PDT

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    http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/30490.html
    
    By John Leyden
    Posted: 01/05/2003 
    
    Infosec exhibitors were yesterday urged to check their systems for a
    virus after the performance of the security conference's network took
    a severe hit.
    
    Exhibitors received an advisory from eForce, which is responsible for
    the networking and security of Olympia, Infosec's venue, that warned
    of an attack linked to a Trojan called Deloader.
    
    According to exhibitor MIS Corporate Defence Solutions, the virus had
    "some effect on the performance of the eForce Ethernet network", and
    "not all exhibitors were affected but undoubtedly some were".
    
    But there may be another explanation for the performance hit.
    
    White hat hacker Rev Rat, of the London 2600 group, told us he saw the
    performance of the network drop off when he scanned the show for
    insecure wireless LANs with a tool called LANGuard.
    
    Using this tool and Netstumbler, Rat and friends discovered 49
    wireless networks - only eight of which were protected by WEP (Wired
    Equivalent Privacy).
    
    The use of WEP, which is itself vulnerable to attacks using cracker
    tools such as AirSnort, is often taken as a benchmark for surveys on
    wireless networks security.
    
    2600 members at the show believe some of networks they found are test
    systems while at least one is a honey pot, deliberately set up to lure
    hackers.
    
    But the majority of the systems he spotted were insecure, according to
    Rat. In the rush to set up systems for the show little attention has
    been paid to security, he argues.
    
    An audit of the show for wireless network vulnerabilities last year
    revealed similar results.
    
    
    
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