It's a crazy, crazy world...

It's mardi gras time for viruses and worms this week. No sooner had the Blaster worm infected millions of computers that someone wrote a counter worm named Nachi. Nachi works almost exactly like Blaster with similar effects, but like a determined foe, it attempts to download the patch for the hole exploited by Blaster from Microsoft, and then attempts to commit hara-kiri! Now if only all worms were so nice. Of course the fact that this worm slows down network traffic like it's devious cousin is of course, beside the point. On tuesday, the ASU network was clogged by the battle of the worms as 'hundreds of computers within ASU mounted attacks on the entire network' as reported in an ASU security bulletin.
Since yesterday, the w32.sobig.a@mm worm has been making the rounds. I've been getting dozens of returned mails from people I absolutely do not know with messages that I've been sending them viruses! This worm infects your windows computer if you are connected to a network and then proceeds to mine your html, text and emails for addresses it can send itself to using its built in SMTP server. It also spoofs the 'from' address so that the email appears to be sent from one of those stolen addresses! I had to keep freeing up space in my inbox all day! I hope none of the profs in my address book got the virus from me. What a crazy week.. the blackouts, the gasoline shortage in phoenix and now all these viruses!