[humorix] An Epidemic Of Honor System Viruses

[James Baughn <jbaughn@ldd.net>]

An Epidemic Of Honor System Viruses 
July 8, 2000

Linux users have always laughed at the Windows lusers who
have to put up with macro viruses. But now a new breed of
virus has emerged in the Unix world -- and it's spreading
like wildfire. These "honor system" viruses, which first
popped up during the Love Bug debacle, request the user to
perform some act and then pass the virus on to friends and
colleagues.  Over the past two months these memes have
mutated and propagated at a fantastic rate.

The original honor system virus told recipients to
"randomly delete numerous files from your system".  Indeed,
many people did obey that command by wiping out their
Windows partition or deleting all of those unreadable .doc
files that clueless friends like to send.

Said one "victim" of this virus, "I've been using Linux for
so long that I completely forgot I even had an
electron-wasting Windows partition.  Thanks to this virus,
and its helpful reminder to delete files, I was able to
free up beaucoup space on my drive to make room for even
more pirated MP3's. You can be sure I passed on this virus
to everyone I knew -- it's the least I could do to help out
the Linux community."

Other variations have entered into the wild, including
"Newbie Nabber", designed to teach a lesson to
inexperienced Linux converts. The message coaxes the
recipient into executing the attached Perl script to "fix a
serious security hole in the Linux kernel that has just
been uncovered by security professionals at Red Hat." As
you can imagine, the script is a Trojan horse that actually
patches the user's mail client to automatically execute
Perl and shell script attachments (hey, if it works for
Microsoft...). It then greps the luser's hard drive for
email addresses and sends a copy of itself to each of them.

Finally, the virus/Trojan outputs this message... "Security
hole found between chair and monitor. Please contact your
system administrator and request a "cluestick" in order to
fix this gaping hole. Have a nice day. Oh, and by the way,
I just deleted your hidden cache of pornography."

Our Vast Spy Network(tm) located the friend of the friend
of the girlfriend of the person who supposedly created the
Newbie Nabber script. He said, "Well, it's Darwin in
action. The naive users victimized by this meme will either
learn a valuable lesson or get fed up with Linux and return
to Windows. Either way we thin out the herd."

A similar virus has also been found in the wild that
targets 31337 Script Kiddies by enticing them to run an
attached script (as root) that will "hack into the
Microsoft website and retrieve the Windows Millennium
source code". This Trojan actually replicates itself and
then commits suicide by  executing "mke2fs /dev/hda1", the
Linux equivalent of FORMAT C:, but without the "Are you
sure?" prompt.

-
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