“Call me hopelessly optimistic if you like, but I’m one of those
people who sees problems as nothing more than opportunities in
really bad packaging. And few such opportunities are as clear as
the one presented by the Ramen Worm.”
“In case you haven’t seen the news, the Ramen Worm is a rather
insidious virtual creature that’s propagating itself around the
Internet and making life ever so much more interesting for server
admins whose systems are running Red Hat Linux 6.2 and 7.0 without
some of the available security patches.”
“First, let’s get one of the more obvious things out of the way:
It’s been known for a long time that Windows was an astonishingly
fertile breeding ground for such binary shenanigans, because 1) it
was all over the planet, 2) [diplomacy] security has never been
Microsoft’s highest priority [/diplomacy], and 3) server admins
have been notoriously lax in applying Service Packs or taking other
minimal steps to secure their systems. Result: Viruses, worms, and
Trojans, oh my!”
“Now that Linux is widely recognized as a major presence on
servers, and one flavor, Red Hat, has a sizable chunk of that
market, it’s also become a juicy target for the script kiddies and
other misanthropic cybervandals. (Which brings up the tangential
question: If you were ruler of the world, what punishment would you
deal out to people who do such things, once they were proven to be
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt? No computer use for five years?
Lop off the first two fingers on their mousing hand? Restrict them
to a 300 baud dial-up line for life?) If anything, we should expect
that Ramen is just one of many more such attacks and attempted
attacks to come; it’s sad but becoming a target is part of the
price you pay in this industry for being successful.”