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Adore Worm

Hit or Miss

Adore Worm

Adore Worm. Wednesday morning I got a call from our ITS department on campus, telling me that several military bases had contacted them to let them know they were detecting portscans originating from my webserver. I quickly sprang into action and discovered that I had picked up a nastly little Linux virus. I thought Linux was supposed to be virus-proof. I thought my firewall was working. Obviously not.

To be safe, I’ve (again) reinstalled Redhat 7.0 from scratch, this time installing fewer services and working with ITS to put me under their university firewall as well. Does it never end?

For a while, I thought ITS would take away my computer privileges on campus or at the very least ask me to shut down my server. I’ve spent a few days now feeling incredibly guilty and mulling over giving the Internet up entirely and shutting down my weblog. Why can’t everyone get along? Why do people have to create computer viruses?

1 response so far (Respond)

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Matt –

That’s what I thought, too, especially since I plan to install Linux (some variant of it) on my new machine (*whenever I get it*) ^.^

I guess it’s the ‘yin and yang’ of the computer business. For all those wonderful programs that keep systems safe, you’ve gotta have viruses to make sure they’re worth the code they’re written in.

Of course, that’s just what I think.

Jerry | 7 Apr 2001