During our last meeting, we discussed worms…and not those of the Mother Nature variety. Our
discussion took us on a short journey into the dark side of those who use their technical know-how in more Sithian ways to create a whole new class of worms – destructive ones not created by Mother Nature.

Ed Skoudis, one of the best security consultants in the field of information security, informs us of potentially worse things to come in the form of superworms.

What, you ask, is a superworm? Well, these critters are particularly destructive and very nasty. It’s suggested that some of their nastiness will come to us via attacks on multiple operating systems, versus past attacks that focused on one type of operating system. So, these worms might infect Microsoft and Linux and a host of other operating systems, all at the same time. While some of these have already been released on a small scale, thankfully, they haven’t made themselves too well-known.

Another way that havoc will be wreaked will be via attacks that exploit multiple vulnerabilities instead of a single one. In other words, these superworms will exploit multiple security holes. Interestingly enough, Nimda fell into this category.

Should these superworms evolve, we’ll probably be faced with a worm that will be so new that we won’t be able to patch our systems because the patches won’t be available. These are called zero-day exploits and this won’t be a good day for us should they grace us with their presence.

There are other ways that these worms will make our lives challenging, but for now, just note that the potential for chaos is all to real.

The good news is that so far these worms haven’t brought about the end of days. We’re still here able to carry on with our lives. However, should trends towards the creation of nastier worms continue, particularly with the anticipation of superworms, we might be in for some very interesting challenges ahead.

With that….have a great day!