ESR: The Final Virus: A Science-Fiction Story

“Special to TechNewsNet, July 2005 — Millions of
Microsoft users woke up to a new and deadlier Blue Screen of Death
this morning. It said ‘This is the Final Virus. For spam to end,
Windows must die!’. Rebooting got them nowhere, because their hard
drives had been formatted. All their data was destroyed.

“A bulletin from CERT, the Computer Emergency Readiness Team
chartered by the U.S. government, advised all Windows users to take
their machines off the Internet immediately. ‘Final is polymorphic,
so normal virus scanners don’t spot it. Final spreads via infected
Web pages, UPnP, the Microsoft Upgrade Channel, the Microsoft
Messenger service, and possibly other routes,’ says the bulletin.
Final seems to be written to do IP port scans and infect a fixed
number of other machines before destroying its host. Infection
reports have been rising exponentially since Final was first
reported four days ago…”

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