ctuel@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (Cliff Tuel) (11/04/88)
Here is the latest news from the Associated Press (Nov. 4, 1:30 am Pacific -- kudos to jmartin@polyslo.uucp) By Jack Messmer Several major universities were shocked to find computer systems infected by a computer "virus," a renegade program potentially capable of destroying data. The extent of the problem isn't known yet, but the virus has been found in systems used by at least six major universities -- M-I-T and Boston College on the East Coast, The University of California at Berkeley on the West Coast, and Illinois, Purdue and Wisconsin in the Midwest. Charley Kline, the senior research programmer at the University of Illinois, says the virus came in through a nationwide network.
vixie@decwrl.dec.com (Paul Vixie) (11/05/88)
I see that this was cross-posted to comp.misc, and perhaps someone else has already answered it there. But in any case, I have a few points to make, in order of importance: 1. UUCP sites are in no known danger. When I heard that people had yanked their Telebits out of the wall after hearing about this, I remembered that most general-purpose damage done in plague situations is from the panic and mis- information. 2. USENET is a lousy way to get real live newswire-type information broadcast; in particular, this topic has been discussed at length in news.admin and news.announce.important as well as comp.bugs.4bsd.ucb-fixes. Forwarding a piece of AP News is almost always silly, since news takes a few days to get everywhere -- when Challenger blew up, 20 people logged in and typed a short message about it. I read about it in the next day's paper before I saw any of the USENET messages on the topic. 3. If anyone wants to discuss this, please do it in news.sysadmin. Neither the worm (note: it's _not_ a virus) nor anything else I've said here has any business in ca.unix or comp.misc. I've redirected followups, please respect that. 4. Do you really have anything to add? If you have a one-line comment that you think is pretty cute, please try it out on your cat -- bandwidth spent on the worm in weeks to come is going to be horrendous, please don't add to it without a Compelling Reason. -- Paul Vixie Work: vixie@decwrl.dec.com decwrl!vixie +1 415 853 6600 Play: paul@vixie.sf.ca.us vixie!paul +1 415 864 7013
guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris) (11/06/88)
>Several major universities were shocked to find computer systems >infected by a computer "virus," a renegade program potentially >capable of destroying data. >...says the virus came in through a nationwide network. Yes, called the ARPANET (or Internet), not UUCP. The virus does not appear to spread via UUCP.