Dangerous Mydoom [virus] Variant Appears

techweb.com via CRN ^ | 01/28/2004 | Gregg Keizer

[New Horizon]

The first copycat of the widespread Mydoom worm appeared Wednesday on the Internet, and some analysts are warning it may be even more dangerous than the original.

*sigh*...of course...

[George W. Bush]

People are so stupid they can't modify their own hosts file?

Dang.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Most folks don't need a host file. Course Windows looks for it, and it's a good idea to set it "read only".

[lelio]

I think 1 out of 100 Windows users know that they have a hosts file. That's a pretty nifty trick.

[Principled]

What's a "hosts file"?

[George W. Bush]

Okay. You guys win. We're helpless morons, incapable of modifying a simple text file.

You can really see how all that computer education in the public schools is paying off.

[George W. Bush]

I'm going to report you to JohnRob!

[hsmomx3]

Bottom line: DO NOT open attachments. Question. Yahoo has an anti virus scan whenever an attachment is sent to you in your Yahoo email account. How does this compare vs. your own av?

[Texaggie79]

I ran the "message.zip" in a controlled environment when I first saw it in my email, this was before any news broke. Norton, being fully updated did not recognize any infection. So I opened it up to see a .doc file. Scanned that and nothing.

So, what the hell, I knew it had to be a virus, but I wanted to see it in action. My zonealarm pro and router firewall kept it from emailing out.

I can see though how many people would open it thinking its just a zip or doc and get infected, never knowing it was a virus.

The stupid thing was, the doc file simply runs a pif file and doesn't even open word pad. If it did, that would fool even more people. Otherwise, they are going to get suspicious and check their processes.

[mlbford2]

I am fairly computer savvy, but I have to say that I don't know what a host file is for. Can you edumecate me?

[BigSkyFreeper]

It's a text file used by the computer to resolve numerical/long name domain names. This is used in place of the ISP domain name server (DNS) which most people should use, since IP addresses sometimes change, which means manually changing the entries in the host file in the windows directory.

[Principled]

heh heh heh

[commish]

Remember there are millions of AOL Losers er I mean Users that have no idea how to do anything beyond pointing and clicking in thier browser and almost peeing themselves in excitement when they hear "you've got mail"

And it is not just point and clickers. My wife is a nurse and the Doctor that she works for (a brilliant man in many respects) has absolutely no clue how to use his home PC. I have worked on his computer for him so many times I could almost qualify as an employee.

[BobS]

Surely there is a conservative hacker out there that can create a mydoom.rat virus that will nullify those wacko dem sites?

[BigSkyFreeper]

I worked on a computer savvy user's computer once, he couldn't figure out why the 2 GHz machine was running slow. I ran a virus scan on it and found 300 viruses, worms and trojan horses running in the background. Got rid of them all and the computer was running like it had the very first day.

[George W. Bush]

Switch them all Linux LiveCDs. Then they'll never be able to screw anything up.

Surprising how many people are looking into it. Especially with memory-key support for documents and personal settings or to boot an entire system from.

It has a certain attraction. We're all about fed up with Winblows and all the virusing and updating.

LiveCDs with memory-key support let you carry your own computer environment anywhere. Virus and hacker proof.

[lelio]

A hosts file relates DNS names (ie freerepublic.com) to IP addresses (ie 209.157.64.200). Back in the Old Days this was done by copying files around computers which then looked at that file to do the lookup manually.

This worked fine when you had a dozen universities on the internet, but it fails miserably with millions of dot com names. So DNS servers came about which told you what IP address you're looking for. No more text files.

Well not quite. All *nix distributions have /etc/hosts which pretty much just lists the loopback address (localhost 127.0.0.1) and maybe their own name -> IP address in it.

Windows has a similiar "stub" file like this too. You'll have to dig around for it, but you can find it under the TCP/IP - DNS settings. Look for something like "hosts" or "lmhosts." Should be a text file with maybe 3 entries in it.

[techwench]

yes. and i work for a "brilliant" inventor that is so absent minded he would need help shutting down his own computer (a virtual goldmine for us "outsourced to india" techs)

[Cagey]

You can really see how all that computer education in the public schools is paying off.

I'd be willing to wager that most of the users on this forum went to school before PC training was even thought of in any school. Not everyone on here is under 30.