[thelist] RE: blaster worm punishment

Andrew Clover and-evolt at doxdesk.com
Sun Jan 30 03:49:52 CST 2005


Steven Streight <vaspersthegrate at yahoo.com> wrote:

> We've all heard how the "teenager" who unleashed the
> Blaster worm, primarily against Microsoft

Not quite. Parson "unleashed" only a trivial hack on the 
already-widespread Blaster, where he changed the filename to his IRC 
handle. His teekids.exe Blaster variant did not spread so much, and he 
did not write the original msblast.exe worm that caused most of the 
problems.

What he did was illegal and stupid, but really pretty lame; trying to 
pin the entire Blaster chaos on him is unfair.

> I say he deserves much much harsher punishment, mainly
> because malicious code can potentially make a nation
> vulnerable to terrorist or criminal attack

Ah, terrorism - the new Godwin.

People are judged on their actions and will. Parson neither achieved nor 
intended to make the nation vulnerable to attack or any other such 
armchair knee-jerk hyperbole.

ObTip: <tip type="security" author="And Clover">
   Don't window.open popups without a location bar. This opens the
   possibility for other sites to replace the content in the popup,
   allowing spoofing/phishing attacks.
</tip>

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and at doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/


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