kidlinux writes "The Globe and Mail has an article discussing the impact of viruses and security flaws in Windows. Apparently Microsoft has bounties out on virus writers. 'The campaign reveals just how much of a threat to Microsoft's bottom line security flaws now represent.' The effects of various worms and security issues are becoming visible in financial terms - having to deal with the security issues keeps Microsoft from closing new deals, and governments and businesses are starting to look at the alternatives, such as Linux. 'For the first time, it seemed, flaws in Microsoft's software were translating into flaws in the company's business model.'"

Iphtashu Fitz writes "According to news.com Microsoft will announce a bounty of $250,000 on Wednesday for information on who wrote two recent Windows viruses. The bounty is offered for information that leads to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus. Microsoft will officially announce the reward in a joint press conference with the FBI and U.S. Secret Service Wednesday morning. This is the first time a company has offered money for information about the identity of the cybercriminals. Could this be the start of a new trend in going after the writers of viruses & worms?"

scubacuda writes "Laurent Oudout, an active member of the French Honeynet Project (part of the Honeynet Alliance), has written a paper evaluating the usefulness of using honeypots in fighting Internet worms. (Imagine a well-constructed honeypot framework capturing a worm, redirecting worm traffic to fake services, and launching counter attacks to clean infected hosts!)"

Theaetetus writes "Microsoft today unveiled its most detailed look yet at its new OS, Longhorn, due in 2006, during Bill Gates' keynote speech at the company's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. An article at Internet Week describes some of the goals: avoiding viruses, worms, and 'building apps that are as smart as Outlook.'" The company "also unveiled 'WinFX,' which it described as a new application programming model for Windows that is the evolution of its .NET programming framework."

Trillian_1138 writes "Scientific America has a brief article, only two paragraphs, sumarizing research from a recently released longevity study done on worms. The worms, Caenorhabditis elegans, have been known to live 124 days, "the equivalent of a human reaching his 500th birthday." In addition, in worms which had their insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) altere, "lived six times longer than normal worms and remained active for most of their lives." "These life-span extensions, which are the longest mean life-span extensions every produced in any organism, are particularly intriguing," the team writes, "because the insulin/IGF-1 pathway controls longevity in many species, including mammals." Humans already live significantly longer than only a century ago, in large part simply from hygiene advances. What might the effects on society be if gene therapy or other medical treatement humans lived to be 500?"

An anonymous reader writes "Thirty years ago, Martin Gardner described Paterson's Worms to the world. Just recently, Benjamin Chaffin, one of the designers of the Pentium 4 chip, managed to trace a couple trillion steps of the 'unsolved' worms, and has pretty much solved all but two of them."

Iphtashu Fitz writes "The University of Florida has apparently come up with a technological approach to deal with P2P file sharing on their campus networks. According to this article on wired.com they have developed a program that scans the PCs of students in the UF dorm rooms. The program, dubbed 'Icarus' not only detects P2P applications but viruses, worms, and other trojans. If a P2P application is found then an e-mail is sent to the user, a message is popped up on their screen, and their internet connection is disconnected. First time offenders lose their connection for 30 minutes. The second offense results in a 5 day loss. The third strike results in an indefinite loss of connectivity. An editorial in The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper, called the use of Icarus 'an invasive and annoying system that further deters students from living in dorms (see also another story).'"

Slashback tonight brings you more on recent RIAA madness, the readability of scrambled words, word of the return of Nullsoft's WASTE, another decision against the FTC's do-not-call list, and more -- read on for the details.

Seft sent in a solid article running on the BBC discussing the next potential worm explosion on the heels of a recent Security Bulletin from Microsoft. The article is a somewhat general topic piece on worms in general.

Thanks to Eurogamer for their first impressions of Worms 3D, as Team 17's 2D turn-based strategy classic gets Sega-published and updated into the third dimension. The article suggest that "...we couldn't really see how the move to 3D would bring with it much in the way of 'improvements'", but ends up addicted, and "surprised at just how timeless the Worms formula appears to be." Blue's News reveals that a demo for Worms 3D is now out, possibly leaked early, but downloadable from Gamer's Hell, 3D Gamers, and BitTorrent via GameTab, and for those of you still digging the original 2D version, it seems the Asian-only Online Worms has 3 million Beta testers in China.

sagman writes "Russ at NTBugtraq is proposing fines for those whose computers allow the propagation of viruses, worms, etc., knowingly or unknowingly... Russ is taking a poll on his site. Russ states in an email that he wrote this up at the request of a US Senator staffer..."

ziggy_zero writes "Security software industry veteran Amit Yoran is expected to be named the new head of federal cybersecurity by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday. The DHS is also partnering with CERT to form the "US-CERT" cyber-attack coordination center, coordinating efforts to fight cyber-attacks, worms, etc."

Mar writes "FRISK Software founder Fridrik Skulason has issued an open letter in which he blames other anti-virus companies for much of the Sobig.F network load problems: 'If mail filters send out one message for every copy of Sobig.F received, they are in effect doubling the amount of traffic. This makes them a part of the problem, not a part of the solution.'"

Slashback tonight brings updates on iTunes music sharing (the mentioned auction's been pulled), the continuing fight against software patents in Europe, the recently scuttled balloon-record attempt, and more. Read on for the details.

chrismg2003 writes "Nationwide universities are opening their doors to new students but closing off their network services. The Blaster worm has caused universities to take drastic actions to protect their campus networks. Universities have gone as far as shutting down their entire resnet network and bringing it back up dorm-by-dorm after each computer has been certified worm-free. The ICMP ping requests alone have brought down my university's resnet multiple times and we are scrambling to clean the worm from all computers before it forces us to follow suit with other universities."

fr0z writes "InformationWeek is running a story on "Billy Goat", a novel worm-squashing software developed by researchers in Zurich, Switzerland. IBM says it wants to turn Billy Goat into a product to help guard against computer-network attacks such as those that slowed Internet traffic earlier this month."

PogieMT writes "An article in the New York Times (registration required) suggests that the rash of security flaws, viruses and worms is leading a push towards greater regulation by the government, which, according to the piece, has largely relied on the efforts of individual companies."

Dan writes "Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language. The goal of this work is to allow firewalling decisions to take place based not only on the source of a connection, but the operating system of that source. Powerful policy enforcement is now possible such as redirecting all older windows boxes to a web site telling them to upgrade. Or blocking all windows boxes from connecting to mail servers (damn worms). A writeup can be found here. Please help contribute to the OS fingerprint database by going to http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f-help/ and typing in your OS description if it does not recognize your OS." Sorry - my fault. It is a dupe.

bl8n8r writes "Experts say when vacationers get back to work Monday, Inboxes will unleash the worms worst attacks. Sunner said that most of the problems caused by SoBig involve the time and cost of cleaning the worm from computer systems. "

stieglmant writes "For everyone who thought the 'blackout of 2003' was bad, how about this, according to an article at SecurityFocus, and another article at The Register, 'The Slammer worm penetrated a private computer network at Ohio's Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January and disabled a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours.'" Russell writes "Maryland MARC Train Service was shut down most of Wednesday morning due to what sounds like the MS-Blast worm or one of its variants. The local Baltimore news reports that the cause was a signal malfunction but CSX, whose communications system runs the tracks, has an article describing the shutdown as a result of 'a worm virus similar to those that have infected the systems of other major companies and agencies in recent days'. This indicates that the network that the train signaling stations are on is not protected by firewalls, at least to block ports 135 and 444 where the DCOM vulnerability is attacked. Wow, taken to the extreme, the exploitation of their systems could have caused a train collision and injury or death to hundreds of Maryland and Virginia commuters."