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The Blaster worm (a.k.a. Lovsan or Lovesan) was a computer worm that spread on computers running the Microsoft operating systems, Windows XP and Windows 2000, during August 2003. A computer worm is a self-replicating computer program, similar to a computer virus. ...
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKEx: 4338) is the worlds largest software company, with 2005 global annual sales of 40 billion US dollars and nearly 60,000 employees in 85 countries and regions. ...
In computing, an operating system (OS) is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations. ...
Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ...
Windows 2000 (Codenamed Cairo, also referred to as Win2K, W2K or Windows NT 5. ...
2003 : January - February - March - April - May - June - July - August - September - October - November - December A timeline of events in the news for August, 2003. ...
The worm was first noticed and started spreading in the wild on August 11. The rate that it spread increased until the number of infections peaked on August 13. Filtering by ISPs and widespread publicity about the worm curbed the spread of Blaster. August 11 is the 223rd day of the year (224th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ...
August 13 is the 225th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (226th in leap years), with 140 days remaining. ...
The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood on August 15 against port 80 of windowsupdate.com, thereby creating a distributed-denial-of-service attack (DDoS) against the site. The damage to Microsoft was minimal as the site targeted was windowsupdate.com instead of windowsupdate.microsoft.com to which it was redirected. Microsoft temporarily shut down the targeted site to minimize potential effects from the worm. A SYN flood is a form of denial-of-service attack in which an attacker sends a succession of SYN requests to a targets system. ...
August 15 is the 227th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (228th in leap years), with 138 days remaining. ...
The worm spread by exploiting a buffer overflow in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
DCOM (Distributed Component Object Model) is a Microsoft proprietary technology for software components distributed across several networked computers. ...
A remote procedure call (RPC) is a protocol that allows a computer program running on one host to cause code to be executed on another host without the programmer needing to explicitly code for this. ...
The worm contains two messages hidden in strings. The first:
I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!! Is why the worm is sometimes called the Lovesan worm. The second: billy gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making money and fix your software!! is an apparent message to Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, and the target of the worm. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
On August 29, 2003, Jeffrey Lee Parson, an 18-year-old from Hopkins, Minnesota was arrested for creating the B variant of the Blaster worm; he admitted responsibility and was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in January 2005. August 29 is the 241st day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (242nd in leap years), with 124 days remaining. ...
2003 (MMIII) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Hopkins is a city located in Hennepin County, Minnesota. ...
Side effects
Although the worm can only spread on systems running Windows 2000 and Windows XP (32 bit), it can cause instability in the RPC service on systems running Windows NT, Windows XP (64 bit), and Windows Server 2003. This can even lead to the system becoming so unstable that it displays the following message and then restarts: Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, and was succeeded by Windows 2000 (still based on Windows NT). ...
Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition released on April 25, 2005 by Microsoft is a variation of the typical 32-bit Windows XP operating system for x86 personal computers. ...
The successor to Windows 2000 Server, Microsofts Windows Server 2003 (codename Whistler Server, also known as Windows NT 5. ...
Windows must now restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service terminated unexpectedly. This error message and the Windows restart can be avoided by changing the properties of the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service, buying an infected user enough time to remove the virus from their system and install a patch removing the vulnerability.
Another method to stop the computer from restarting is as follows:
- Go to Start->Run
- Type "shutdown -a" and press Enter
If run as an Administrator, this will stop the reboot (-a stands for "Abort").
Additionally, systems running the Open Software Foundation's Distributed computing environment can be affected by traffic generated from the worm. Packets generated by the worm can cause DCE to crash causing a Denial of Service of DCE. The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was an organization founded in 1988 to create an open standard for an implementation of the Unix operating system. ...
The Distributed Computing Environment (DCE) is a software system developed in the early 1990s by a consortium that included Apollo Computer (later part of Hewlett-Packard), IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, and others. ...
See also This is a list of noteworthy computer viruses and worms. ...
Below is a list of crackers (erroneously referred to as hackers by the media) sentenced to incarceration, fines, community service, and/or other penalties for unauthorized access or electronic tampering under the Computer Misuse Act of 1990 (or similar laws). ...
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