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Valentine’s Day Fix For Kama Sutra Worm
John Stith
Staff Writer
2006-02-01
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It's a decent headline. It's better than saying Microsoft is waiting to fix a vulnerability being exploited until after the fact. The Kama Sutra worm has been making and is estimated to have made its way into close to half a million computers worldwide. Patch Tuesday is next week so they'll wait and fix it then.
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The problem with this worm is the damage will be done before then. The little bugger has many names including Nyxem, Blackdoom, Tearec and Microsoft's title Win32/Mywife.E@mm. While many feel the threat of this worm has been overstated, the point is it can do damage and Microsoft could fix it. So why don't they.
February 3rd (Friday) is the day the worm drops its load and for those who are infected, it will be quite nasty. The worm wiggles through one's hard drive, overwriting them all over the place. It will overwrite Word files, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and PDF files. All the lost content will be replaced with the phrase: "DATA Error [47 OF 94 93 F4 K5]."
Microsoft's Anti-Malware blog said this:
Finally, there has been significant discussion regarding the web-based counter that the worm uses and attempts to map the values of the counter to infection statistics. Our investigation has revealed that the web counter that is incremented by the malicious software is being artificially manipulated by outside parties. It is therefore not a trustworthy indication of the infection rate or of the total of infected computers. Instead, we utilize our industry partnerships as well as our own internal data to help gauge the impact to customers. This information has revealed that the attack is limited at this time.
While the problem may not be as serious as say the WMF, the problem is still there. The only possible reason Microsoft might have for not releasing this is it's not ready. They should drop this out BEFORE the bomb drops. It would be a good bit of PR for Microsoft, something they need right now. It would also be the right thing to do because the problem is rooted entirely in their software.
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About the Author:
John is a staff writer for SecurityProNews covering cyber security.
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