Net Worm Uses Google to Spread 309
troop23 writes "A web worm that identifies potential victims by searching Google is spreading among online bulletin boards using a vulnerable version of the program phpBB, security professionals said on Tuesday. Almost 40,000 sites may have already been infected. In an odd twist if you use Microsoft's Search engine to scan for the phrase 'NeverEverNoSanity'-- part of the defacement text that the Santy worm uses to replace files on infected Web sites--returns nearly 39,000 hits." Reader pmf sent in a few more information links: F-Secure weblog and Bugtraq posting. Update: 12/22 03:34 GMT by T : ZephyrXero links to this news.com article that says Google is now squashing requests generated by the worm.
Re:Latest Version of phpBB Unaffected (Score:2, Insightful)
> the worm, though. Time to upgrade if you haven't yet!
That's alright. All the lazy admins will blame Google and everything will be okay!
This, I suspect, is going to be a new way of infecting web-based apps. Just do a search for the vulnerable software on Google, Yahoo or whatever, pop in, do your damage and be on your way.
Of course, it will get much worse if its some sort of E-commerce software or something like that and these worms happily start stealing credit card transactions.
Re:Latest Version of phpBB Unaffected (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe it's a theme - the worms of tomorrow will do what the script kiddies of today do.
Dshield disagrees (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
I got hit (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ehhh.. Tape drive perhaps?? (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes tapes can break, otherwise I've not seen nearly the same sorts of problems as with hard drives.
Ok, not a tape lover then how about backup to cd-rw or DVD. But for goodness sake get the backup onto a medium that you take out of the computer and that you can put a copy offsite.