You've landed in Danaville. This site is something of a personal knowledge base. Mostly a home for notes about my day-to-day discoveries in the digital world. While some tips may seem obvious (we learn a new thing every day right?), hopefully you'll find a few of them informative and perhaps useful in your own tech travels!
Will Conflicker be a Learning Experience?
April 1st, 2009 by danalwebb received No Comments »
The Windows operating system has always been insecure — and I don’t mean as in self-esteem!
The Conficker/Downup/Downadup/Kido computer worm that first surfaced in October 2008 and is believed to activate today (April 1, 2009) only targets the Microsoft Windows operating system. You heard that right, it only affects Windows – not MacOS or Linux. Unfortunately, in this situation one out of three is bad – and, as usual with Windows security, its very bad news for the internet as a whole. So far however, the news is good this morning and hell has not broken loose on the backbone segments of the net. But the day is young.
I am certainly not an Anarchist nor do I approve of the malicious activities of virus breeding script-kiddies, but it would be helpful if some “minor catastrophe” occurred as a result of Conflicker. If hundreds of businesses stop production because of this worm, the public should think about an alternative operating system platform. In my humble opinion, Linux (the GNU Operating System) is the best choice for the cost ($0) or MacOS for every other reason.
If this worm proves to be very troublesome, what’ll happen?
Websites like MySpace.com and WhiteHouse.gov are running the Microsoft IIS web server. If these servers are infected, they will go down. Or, they will become spam websites, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails.
WhiteHouse.gov is, obviously, a governmental website, and if it becomes a spam website, displaying advertisements and sending out thousands of spam and denial of service emails to other countries, that’s a national threat (well, sorta). Also, who knows what other servers WhiteHouse.gov might be connected to within their extended computing grid. Missile systems, Air Force navigation systems, Presidential Teleprompters? Lets pray Microsoft has nothing to do with those!
Thankfully Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Wikipedia are all happily running GNU/Linux on their servers. These are among the most popular/stable web sites as well — coincidence?
On the other hand, WhiteHouse.gov is most likely running the Microsoft IIS web server because the person they have in control of the servers, their “Webmaster”, only knows how to use Microsoft Windows. Therein lies the problem – in the humble opinion of this Webmaster.
Posted under: Linux, Open Source, Security, Virus, Windows
