Also, let's not forget that Max Vision got sent up the river for something similar. Plain and simple, there's no such thing as a "beneficial" worm -- besides, how would *you* like it if you received a message saying, "Hi. You don't know me from Adam, but I just patched your webserver against the latest vulnerability. I didn't throw in any trapdoors or any other bad stuff. Scout's honor." Besides, even the best of intentions sometimes goes straight to crap. Sure, the code you wrote may have tested just fine on your box, but Alice's webserver crashes instantly upon exposure, and Bob's starts to BSoD at random times afterwards. Legally it's a violation of (I think -- please correct me if I'm wrong) 18 USC 1030, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act 1986. That's assuming it works as planned. If it starts to DoS webservers, you could be held civilly liable for the business impact. Ethically, it's pretty much unconscionable. Just because we *can* take advantage of vulnerabilities, it doesn't necessarily follow that we *should*. The possible for damage or misuse far outweighs any potential benefits. Just my $0.02, as always, I welcome any comments/flames/voodoo curses... Mike -----Original Message----- From: LARD BENJAMIN LEE [mailto:Benjamin.Lardat_private] Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 7:11 PM To: BUGTRAQ Subject: Mitigating some of the effects of the Code Red worm I'm not sure of the ethical or legal aspects of this, but I don't see why we can't take advantage of three facts: 1) There is something of an ongoing log of affected machines that can be obtained from boxes earlier in the IP list. 2) Machines which have been compromised can STILL be compromised. 3) The worm has a "lysine deficiency" which can be remotely introduced. What I'm getting at, is for someone to create another exploit that creates the C:\notworm file in infected machines and does something to notify whoever is in charge of a particular box (even something as simple as placing you_are_hacked.txt and a link to the patch on the desktop could be beneficial). Even better, an exploit to patch a machine (through removing the .ida and .idq extensions) would prevent the inevitable wave of post-attacks (both from this worm and future attacks). Of course, I'm guessing this is illegal, although I highly doubt you'd be prosecuted. If someone has the expertise to create a "white hack" such as this, I'm sure there are daring admins out there who would happily attempt to stem the flow. If we don't do something, you know it's just a (very short) matter of time before script kiddies, armed with a modified worm and a log of infected machines, do something more sinister. Ben Lard University of Colorado, Boulder
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Jul 20 2001 - 07:55:50 PDT