MAJOR VIRUS ALERT!!!

[Kurt Cagle <kurt@kurtcagle.net>]

Information from today's news service. We are about to discover what War
really means in cyberspace:

A NEW WORM that can infect all 32-bit Windows computers and propagates using
multiple methods has spread across the world Tuesday morning, according to
Roger Thompson, technical director of malicious code at TruSecure.

The worm, called Nimda (admin spelled backwards), can spread via e-mail
attachments, HTTP, or across shared hard disks inside networks, Thompson
said. The worm can infect all 32-bit Windows systems -- Windows 98, 2000,
Millennium Edition, XP, NT -- because it scans systems for between 10 and
100 different vulnerabilities and exploits them when found, he said.

"It looks like they've made a Swiss Army Knife," Thompson said, referring to
the number of different tools the worm can use to attack systems.

"Every Win32 system is going to be vulnerable, if not from one
[vulnerability], then from another," he said.

When spread by e-mail, Nimda arrives in inboxes as an attachment called
"Readme.exe" or sometimes Readme.eml, Thompson said. The Readme file,
however, has a malformed header (the data at the beginning of a file that
allows a system to identify its type) which makes the computer think it is a
WAV, or sound, file, he said. However, Readme.exe is in fact a program and
can be executed just from the preview panel when viewing it without it being
opened, he said.

Once the worm has infected a system, be it by HTTP, e-mail, or disk sharing,
it then scans its local subnet (a chuck of the Internet) looking for
vulnerable systems, Thompson said. Although some systems, such as those that
are up to date on their patches, are protected behind firewalls or those
that are filtering .exe attachments, will be safe from some aspects of the
worm, that it spreads via three methods makes it more difficult to stop, he
said. The spread of the worm across shared disks, which are more than likely
entirely unprotected, "is going to be a real pain," he said.

The worm was discovered by Thompson's worldwide network of "worm catcher"
systems at 9:08 a.m. ET Tuesday, he said. Within half an hour, it had spread
across the whole world, he said.

"[Nimda] is certainly much faster, much more aggressive, and much bigger"
than Code Red, Thompson said. Code Red was another recent worm that caused a
good deal of damage and consternation for systems administrators worldwide.

Although Code Red did not ultimately have an impact on Internet performance
despite some initial claims to the contrary, "we may actually see a hit on
the Internet [and its performance]" with Nimda, Thompson said.

Computer security bodies the Computer Emergency Response Team/Coordination
Center (CERT/CC) and Incidents.org both issued alerts about increased
activity on the Internet Tuesday, stating that the activity may be related
to the worm.

The spread of Nimda comes after warnings from a number of groups saying that
attacks on networks and Web sites were possibilities after last Tuesday's
terrorist attacks against New York and the Pentagon, outside of Washington.
Although Thompson declined to comment on a possible connection between this
worm and those attacks, saying it was inappropriate, the advisory released
by TruSecure said, "we cannot discount the coincidence of the date and time
of release, exactly one week to [probably to the minute] as the World Trade
Center attack."
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>
To: "Kurt Cagle" <kurt@kurtcagle.net>;
<humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 11:20 AM
Subject: RE: markup race


> BTW:  it is a tougher struggle in some of these
> databases to get the designers and data owners
> to change sex to gender.  That is why there
> is an "impersonator" field there; not that we
> have to keep it, but I wanted to show how
> some dbs deal with that.  Strange?  Nope.
> Common.
>
> Race never comes up as an issue because they
> assume everyone can use that correctly.  There
> is another field one sees called "ethnicity".
> Weirdly, in national crime reporting systems,
> it only has one value:  Hispanic.  Go figure.
>
> And this is a problem of design by extraction
> from extant systems.  We should be careful as
> Volker's example points out, to question the
> terms and inquire of the context of use.  Almost
> any term is loaded in some context and we will
> run into more of these as we go along.
>
> Len
> http://www.mp3.com/LenBullard
>
> Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
> Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Cagle [mailto:kurt@kurtcagle.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2001 10:28 AM
> To: humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: Re: markup race
>
>
> > He has also done much to show how genetic data from present human racial
> > groups could be used to reconstruct their past separations. This
> > reconstruction, based on the analysis of 58 genes, yields a bifurcated
> > evolutionary tree with Caucasian and African races in one branch and
> > Orientals, Oceanians, and Amerinds in the other. The main division
> appeared,
> > according to Cavalli-Sforza, some 35-40,000 years ago."
> Interesting. I've had my suspicion for some time that about 40,000 years
ago
> man invented boats, initially to make it easier to fish locally, but over
> time making it easier to follow the largest game source -- whales. The
> routes where most human exploration seem to have been made are also whale
> migration routes.  This is completely irrelevant to the discussions about
> markup, of course.
>
> Here's where things get complicated, however. One way of looking at
HumanML
> from a physical description standpoint is that it is a measure of
> phenotype -- blonde hair, blue eyes, that sort of thing. We know today
that
> phenotype is an expressive rather than an intrinsic set of qualities that
> are based upon genotype; this is one of the reasons why phenotypic
> classification is so difficult ... the finer the granularity of the
> classification, the more obvious it becomes that phenotype is a poor
> classification mechanism, yet at the same time I think it is likely that
no
> one here wants to tackle the issues of creating a genetic map of human
> beings. Just my two cents worth.
>
> -- Kurt
>
>
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