Originally posted by: Rainsford
That's what I love about the Internet, rumors start flying just because someone says something that might possibly be true. There could be a small grain of truth in this (although I doubt it), but it seems kind of unlikely. People can be made to believe anything if they want it to be true or are afraid it is.
While this is true to a point, the fun can start happening now, while this is a rumor (if it is 100% rumor). How do we modify things to protect ourselves from this eventuality? It has been proven that .pdf files can contain exploit information, and I believe mp3s also fall on that list.
Now, something based on the principle of a warhol worm could be extremely deadly in this case. There is another type of worm that is like this, but I forget the name at the moment. Basically, if you can find an exploit for KAzaa or attatched to one of these files that someone downloads and will exploit whichever media player they use (I would target winamp and WMP first and foremost), how many infections could you get in an hour? A day? A week?
If you had an exploit for Kazaa and could trojan it to exploit the vulnerability in connecting Kazaa machines you could easily take out a couple of hundred machines in under an hour. You get infected. Someone connects to you to get Oops_I_did_it_again.mp3 and gets infected. 2 people connect to that machine to get Anna_kornakova_upskirt.mpeg and bang_bus_7_the_buses_fight_back.mpeg and get infected. And so on and so on. Estimations for a pure warhol worm are 1million machines in 15 minutes. The modified worm I am talking about obviously will take a little longer, but by disguising the exploit as "normal kazaa traffic" it could be easier to hide. Plus, hiding exploits in these media files offers you another method of infection.
This is not a simple "Is this true?!" situation we are looking at here. We should also be looking at "What if?" and "When will we see this?" Its not a new idea, and this message will bring the idea out into the forefront of the media (atleast the geek media for now). This idea will be sown into every skript kiddy, dick, and harry and it will happen.
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