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A federal judge on Friday sentenced a 19-year-old Minnesota man to 18 months in prison for unleashing a variant of the MSBlast worm. Jeffrey Lee Parson, 19, of Minnesota was ordered to serve his time in a minimum security prison and participate in 10 months of community service. FBI agents arrested Parson at his home in Hopkins, Minn., in August 2003, just two weeks after his "MSBlast.B" variant began to tunnel into Microsoft Windows-based computers. His variant of the worm infected approximately 48,000 computers that had not yet applied an earlier released patch. Parson pleaded guilty last summer in a...

MSBlast copycat set to pounce, firm says By Ina Fried CNET News.com September 16, 2003, 5:42 PM PT Tools now exist to exploit a recently announced Windows flaw, further increasing the likelihood that new viruses will emerge soon, a security firm has warned. Ken Dunham, an analyst at Reston, Va.-based iDefense, said Tuesday it is "highly likely" that new worms or Trojan horses will emerge in the next few days. They are expected to prey on computers that have not been updated with the latest security patch for Microsoft's operating system. "A new Blaster-like worm family could be created in...

A fast-spreading Internet worm infecting more than a million computers worldwide forced the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration to shut its offices for the day and is causing problems for other computer networks in the Washington region. The worm, dubbed "Blaster" by security experts, is having a "sporadic" effect on federal agency networks, said a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security......(snip) [Article is long but good]

I recently got DSL and and with a brand new notebook, I got hit yesterday with MSBLAST before I could even dowload the Microsoft patch. That presented quite a problem, especially because I am not a computer tecno geek. One of the main problems is that the virus keeps knocking you off the internet before you can get to the Microsoft patch to download it. Here is a solution that worked for me. I called by dialup ISP and asked them if they could download the patch and burn it on a CD for me. They did that immediately, I...

A virus-like computer attack that began spreading across the Internet and crashing computer networks Monday is expected to infect hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide in coming days. By Saturday, it may reach a climax when it's programmed to direct all infected computers to attack a security-related Microsoft Web site, computer security experts said. The target Web site, www.windowsupdate.com, is used by millions of Microsoft users each week to automatically update computers with the latest anti-virus software and patches. It's unclear how much damage might be caused by the computer worm, already dubbed LoveSan, Blaster and MSBlaster. But security...

Sorry for the vanity, but my computer stopped working today. I would get an error message: "Generic host process for Win 32 services System Shutdown NT Authority / System" "Remote Procedure Call (RCP) service has terminated unexpectedly" Then it would do a 60-second countdown until it shut down the computer. It's a weird looking error message and the backwards countdown from 60 seconds until it shuts down the system seems very ominous (although I suppose it's better than an immediate crash). It did it once about a week ago, then today it would happen as soon as I'd reboot, so...

All, Here a scoop to Freepers which is just now hitting us security pro's. There is a first vulnerability that uses the MS Bug that MS addressed with MS 03-026 two weeks ago. It is calling itself MSBLAST.exe and is spreading in the wild unbelievably fast. http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?date=2003-08-11 A first advisory from McAffee has just been published: http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/defa...&virus_k=100547 Once it finds a vulnerable system, it will spawn a shell on port 4444 and use it to download the actual worm via tftp. The exploit itself is very close to 'dcom.c' and so far appears to use the "universal Win2k" offset only....