The Zana Zen

Another post about viruses! YAY! well, and this time it’s even more sophisticated than my ecological computer viruses post. A few years ago I asked myself what kind of viruses can cause the most damage to a certain company or an organization? well, I’m not that evil (even if my nickname suggests so), but it still a nice question to ponder about. If you remember MyDoom, the worm which infected around 500,000 computers worldwide and launches a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack against The SCO Group’s website www.sco.com in 2004, you probably remember how much noise it made back then.

It made me think about an idea. Could a worm, such as MyDoom, lead a Big Company (BC) into some legal issues? could it force that company into juridical matters or problems? well… the answer is yes, let me explain how this can be achieved. Consider a worm such as MyDoom, which spreads into a decent amount of computers and launches a DNS DDoS attack, an attack that leverages the DNS protocol in its advantage in order to amplify the DDoS ~73 times than the original generated packets. Consider this power and the assumption that if it launches the attack against BC’s website, the website will be down for a long period, causing BC to lose huge portions of their income. But (and here comes the juridical issue…), what if that worm would have a predefined condition for this attack, such as the following: if BC’s website has a .txt file placed at a specific URL, and it would contain something like 15 other domain names, that each one of them has a Google Page Rank value of above 6, then the DDoS attack will move to those websites, sparing BC’s website and allowing more income to flow. Of course that those websites would be shutted down and they would blame BC for this fault. Lawsuits will come and BC might pay those websites for their damage, but, it might be still cost-effective for BC to place that .txt file, since the compensation will cost much less than the loses that would have been caused if BC hadn’t placed that .txt file.

A lot of side-effects emerges and this idea can be further developed. I’ll just bring up another “fun” thing that can be done with such power. One creative worm can let Big Company #1 (BC1) and Big Company #2 (BC2) play chess against each other, the worms will read a .txt file both at BC1 and BC2 and let them play chess against each other on a predefined board that would be extracted from the worm itself. Every 5 minutes, each company should make a move. The one who lose will suffer the DDoS attack. The worms would synchronize themselves in a P2P manner to prevent from the companies to trick them.

Well, that’s about it, I hope this post was fun reading as it was fun for me to write it

Until the next time… CYa.

One can create an ecological computer virus.

• The Printer Virus - The virus will schedule it’s destruction event to a certain date, it needs to do it’s job without interference. It will detect when the computer is idle for a couple of hours and the local time shows that it is early in the morning. It will send an ACPI event to turn on the printer and start printing on low quality to waste as much paper as it can.
  The results can be devastating, if it will spread to 1,000,000 computers covertly and print 25 pages on average at each computer it infected. Then the earth will loose 25 * 1,000,000 * 100gr = 2,500,000,000gr of paper which is 2756 tons (907kg a ton) of paper. According to enote, each ton of paper is equivalent to 17 trees, so it turns out to be a total waste of ~49,000 trees!
• The WiFi Virus - It’s job is to fry out human beings, the virus will transmit nonstop until someone will feel bad.
• Power Consumption - A virus can be designed to use as much power as it can by turning off ACPI (or using it to it’s advantage) and using the hardware (especially the disks) in an excessive way. Higher power consumption equals to higher power plant duties, they’ll burn more oil and pollute the environment.
• The Subwoofer Virus - This one plays a continuous low frequency sound. In accordance to the theory of chaos, a hurricane will be created somewhere

The product of 1,000,000 infected computers can really create a difference, even with small things.

It’s nice to have fun about it, but now you can guess what a stupid bug(?) in Yahoo Messanger for example with millions of clients world wide can do.