The Witty worm: a new chapter in malware

Tuesday, 8 June 2004, 1:34 PM EST

If press coverage is any guide, then the Witty worm wasn't all that successful. Blaster, SQL Slammer, Nimda, even Sasser made bigger headlines. Witty infected only about 12,000 machines, almost none of them home users. It didn't seem like a big deal.
But Witty was a big deal (see story). It represented some scary malware firsts and is likely a harbinger of worms to come. IT professionals need to understand Witty and what it did.

Witty was the first worm to target a particular set of security products -- in this case Internet Security System's BlackICE and RealSecure. It infected and destroyed only computers that had particular versions of this software running.

By Bruce Schneier at Computerworld.

[ Read more ]

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