quote:
Said Hyponnen: "On the 16th of August, the worm will start a distributed denial of service attack against the windowsupdate.com server".
Good thing: Microsoft gets hit badly.
Bad thing: Due to worm traffic on my local network I'm getting bad ping times in games.
[sob]
And yeah, if you leave samba open to the www you deserve to get hit but this isn't the underlying problem - the problem is that Microsoft security is crap. By *default* a fresh install of XP will leave "shared folders" network writable which leaves you open as all hell to nimda etcetera. Not to mention the speed with which other worms can crack samba passwords.
Oh and by the way for those of us on permanent LANs (me) and running Windows (not me
) using a firewall when connecting to the internet wont help. Because samba will be open to the local network (this is after all what it's intended purpose is) all it takes is for *one* person on a Windows users subnet (could even be on the same subnet your ISP just gave you) and you can quite easily be infected. A firewall is useless, the only "safety" available is to turn off samba or password it. Which off course makes samba completely useless for anonymous file sharing as well.
(Even then most samba passwords can be cracked quickly. Especially if you have XP home and havent booted up in safe mode to give the "administrator" account a password.)
Unpassworded admin accounts by default. Good work Bill you dumb fuck.
