The Return Of Old “Friends”

This is not the news I wanted to hear while I am sitting here enjoying my weekend.

An old worm known as Slammer, which originated back in January 2003, is still going strong according to Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy at IBM’s Internet Security Systems (IBM ISS).

Ollmann, the author of the white paper “Old threats never die”, says that Slammer is still the threat most commonly encountered by IBM ISS.

“Antivirus systems can handle tens of thousands of new signatures without blinking, but after a few hundred thousand they begin to struggle a bit,” he wrote in a blog post this week. “Now, with several hundred thousand new virus strains each year (and increasing faster than Moore’s Law), things are getting pretty creaky.”

Why doesn’t someone write a virus that attacks other viruses instead? They’re doing it in medicine so it only makes sense that they can do it with computers.

Technorati Tags: worms, virus, slammer, anti-virus
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Posted on August 25, 2007
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