Oh crap, watch out for the Sasser worm! (1 Viewer)

[Mike Fassler]

a firewall isnt gonna stop anything if you dont have a clue on how to set it up properly.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

You shouldn't need to. I've not had chance to try it with this one but with Blaster both ZoneAlarm and the bog-standard XP firewall stopped it getting into the machine. Sasser works in the same way but by targetting the LSASS service rather than RPC.

But, there isn't much excuse for companies that didn't at least make a start on the patching. As usual, you have to have a multi-layered approach to these things.

 

[SethH]

For home computers any out-of-the-box firewall will stop any of these worms. They are all configured with ALL ports closed. This includes ZoneAlarm, XP Firewall, and all routers with built-in firewalls. The problem comes in corporate firewalls where they have to leave some ports open for different reasons, or as mentioned above, someone brings it in from the outside. But you really need to have no knowledge of how to setup a firewall to block these worms.

 

[Gary->dee]

18 year-old German confesses to creating Sasser worm

Good job, kid!

HANOVER, Germany (AFP) - An 18-year-old German man has confessed to creating the Internet Sasser worm which infected millions of computers worldwide last week, police said.

The teenager, whom police have not identified by name, was arrested Friday after a raid on his house in Rotenburg, in the northern state of Lower Saxony, which turned up incriminating evidence.

He was released from custody after questioning.

The Sasser worm struck on May 1, and in less than a week affected thousands of companies and as many as 18 million computers worldwide, forcing some businesses to shut temporarily in order to debug their systems.

The worm attacks through a flaw in recent versions of Microsoft's Windows operating systems -- Windows 2000 (news - web sites), Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP (news - web sites) -- and forces the computer into an unstoppable pattern of shutting down, then rebooting. It apparently does no lasting harm.

 

[Drew Bethel]

How do I setup the XP built in firewall. I already have Zone Alarm setup but was wondering...

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Control Panel, Network Connections, whatever connect you're using, Properties, Advanced.

 

[Drew Bethel]

Oh, I know about that. I was actually expecting to see "firewall". Thanks.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Well, it does say "Internet Connection Firewall"

 

[Neil S. Bulk]

Macs do make life easier. It wasn't long ago I was doing all of this updating and stuff.

Neil