Every now and then we come across a computer virus. A virus is a program designed to form replicas of it and spread across systems. There are various categories of viruses like Trojan, worms, rootkits spyware and a few adware. A worm is that category of virus which copies itself and spreads to other nodes using a network. A worm does not need to attach itself to other programs like a virus. It can work on its own and copy itself all over a network. Almost all worms have some harmful effect unlike a virus which may or may not be harmful. Therefore we always have to watch out for warms and keep our computers steady. We may come across many worms. Morris worm and mydoom are payload worms which can cause high levels of damage to a system. Other worms like blaster worms also harm the machine a lot. So, one need to have a sound knowledge about worms like blaster worm.
The brief features of a Blaster worm
A Blaster worm is self sufficient in creating its own copies and spreading across systems using computer networks. It is also known by the names of MS-Blast, lovesan or lovsan. These are mostly found in MS operating systems and may not need to attach itself to any existing program. It is capable of replicating itself on its own. The primary targets of blaster worm is windows operating system like windows XP(32-bit ), windows XP(64-bit), Windows NT server. Also systems running on windows 200 and windows server can also be harmed by blaster worms. This was created in august 2003. The first blaster was created by a Chinese cracking collective named as Xfocus. It used Microsoft patch and executed the attack. A buffer flow is used for the replication procedure of the virus and it spread across nodes of the same network. The last stage of Delirium, which is a polish cracking group were the first to discover a buffer flow. This is made use of by the Blaster virus. There are a few variants present like w32.blaster.worm, w32.blaster.b.worm, w32.blaster.c.worm, w32.d.blaster.worm, w32.blaster.e.worm. It was designed to start a SYN flood at port 80 of windowsupdate.com. It creates a situation called DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service attacks). So, a blaster can prove very harmful and a computer needs to be kept under strict vigilance. The effects of the blaster worms include automated system shutdown after the display of a message like. “Please save all your work”, or “the system is shutting down”, “the system is logging off”. After that the system shutdowns on its own however, it sometimes shows different messages during start-ups and also a blank welcome screen. Hence, it affects the normal functioning of the system. Thus, the user needs to keep his system free from Blaster and other types of worms. Well, to keep a system free of worms, the following steps should be kept in mind. A worm mostly attacks the vulnerable areas of a system. So, by using an antivirus and keeping it updated from time to time, we can gather some protection. Also, various worm removing tools and guarding software are available, which may be used to keep the system virus free.
