There was a list I saw of some of these 'legitimate' web sites and if
one of my employees had surfed there I would have fired his or her rear
end. This would have been way casual surfing that even a home user
would have a bit of a time stumbling over. Add to that, that 98/MEs are
not automagically infected... and what's the real and true number of
infected machines?
What source do you have for "hundred of thousands of machines"? Stats
please? Source materials? Verifiable details so that others can count
the same body counts?
If you are talking about just any ol' bot or trojan.... the ugly reality
is that the average user doesn't know and doesn't care and will continue
to surf and click until the machine becomes so slow and unusable that
then they get it wiped and cleaned.
What we need here is education of why we shouldn't be blindly clicking
like we are. When you buy a new computer...where is the security
education from the Best Buy or Dell?
But to say this is "It's probably bigger than for any other
vulnerability we've seen"
http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/03/technology/windows_virusthreat/index.htm?cnn=yes
Gimme a break... it didn't stop the Internet [SQL Slammer], it didn't
shut down entire businesses [Blaster], but it did freak out the Security
community.
Drew Simonis wrote:
Overall, I think community's coverage of wmf has been delivered
with an ounce of perception, and a pound of obscurity. It's almost
as if people *want* it to be worse than it is. I'm not surprised,
of course. But regardless, my call is that we'll see a little
activity here and there, the patch will come out, most will install
it (or have it installed automatically) and the whole issue will
fade away. But that's all.
We'll know for sure shortly, either way.
Thor,
I think your path of thought is stuck a bit in the past. Worms are neat as a technical exercise, but we see more and more that the attackers are increasingly aware of the value of these vulnerabilities from a financial perspective, not merely for notoriety. As such, it benefits the attacker to have a less subtle attack, one that does not sensationalize the vulnerability. Complacency is their ally.
That said, there are already numerous (hundreds+) "legitimate" web sites that have been compromised and had exploit images injected into their content. There are also already hundreds of thousands of machines that have been infected with Trojans or bots. These infected machines will patch, but they won't be safe, and the problem gets worse.
So no, there won't be some catastrophic worm event. But I posit that what there will be could be much worse.
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