March 25, 2001

5:27 PM

Up to 20% of the internet vulnerable to a virus. There is a new Linux worm virus. Apparently, it steals passwords, installs and hides other hacking tools on infected systems, and then uses those systems to seek other servers to attack. Sys admins are advised to run a check on their servers and upgrade their BIND version.
posted by borgle (5 comments total)

How is this anything to do with Linux... that they run BIND? The numbers affected are big, but BIND has a fresh mouldy hole found each day.

I've been much happier since switching to DJB-DNS (Intro)
posted by holloway at 5:41 PM on March 25, 2001

First of all, where the crack is that 20% coming from? No, 20% of the internet is *not* running a vulnerable version of BIND... The wording in the article makes me believe they *might* mean that 20% of all BIND installs are vulnerable. That isn't nearly as worrying.

holloway, I believe its main code is a binary executable, which is probably linux-specific. It might work on another OS with linux-compatability, though.

more info
posted by whatnotever at 8:52 PM on March 25, 2001

"holloway, I believe its main code is a binary executable"

No, its "main code" is exactly that -- source code -- which can theoretically be compiled on any system. BIND runs successfully on Linux, BSD, UNIX (any of them, I imagine), and Windows NT/2K. A Mac OS X port will probably show up soon enough, since it's based on BSD. And with enough determination, you could probably get it to run on just about anything else.
posted by CrayDrygu at 9:56 AM on March 26, 2001

I was referring to the worm itself, not BIND. The worm is an executable, I believe, so it won't spread to other OSes very easily.
posted by whatnotever at 1:28 PM on March 26, 2001

Ah...I missed that. Sorry.

Anyway, yah, if the virus/worm is an executable, then not only will it not spread to other OSes, but it also won't spread to people running Linux on things like Alpha or Mac processors. If it's just a set of clever shell scripts or perl scripts, though, it'll spread much easier.
posted by CrayDrygu at 8:14 PM on March 26, 2001