Computer Viruses

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COMPUTER VIRUSES

CONTENTS

3A bit of history

What is a computer virus? 4

Who writes computer viruses? 5

To whose advantage computer viruses are written? 6

A legal notice. Penal Code of Russian Federation 7

Synopsis 8

SOURCES 9

Appendix 10

�A bit of history

2 November 1988 Robert Morris younger (Robert Morris), graduate student of informatics faculty of Cornwall University (USA) infected a great amount of computers, connected to Internet network. This network unites machines of university centres, private companies and governmental agents, including National Aeronautics Space Administration, as well as some military scientific centres and labs.

Network worm has struck 6200 machines that formed 7,3% computers to network, and has shown, that UNIX not okay too. Amongst damaged were NASA, LosAlamos National Lab, exploratory centre VMS USA, California Technology Institute, and Wisconsin University (200 from 300 systems). Spread on networks ApraNet, MilNet, Science Internet, NSF Net it practically has removed these network from building.

According to "Wall Street Journal", virus has infiltrated networks in Europe and Australia, where there were also registered events of blocking the computers.

Here are some recalls of the event participants:

Symptom: hundreds or thousands of jobs start running on a Unix system bringing response to zero.

Systems attacked: Unix systems, 4.3BSD Unix & variants (e.g.: SUNs) any sendmail compiled with debug has this problem. This virus is spreading very quickly over the Milnet. Within the past 4 hours, it has hit >10 sites across the country, both Arpanet and Milnet sites. Well over 50 sites have been hit. Most of these are "major" sites and gateways.

Method: Someone has written a program that uses a hole in SMTP Sendmail utility. This utility can send a message into another program.

Apparently what the attacker did was this: he or she connected to...