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Speaker 1: tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi, welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. My name is Chris Poett. I'm an
Speaker 1: editor here and How Stuff Works and with me is
Speaker 1: writer Jonathan Strickland. My computer doesn't feel well. Have you
Speaker 1: taken its temperature? Uh? Actually this is not the one
Speaker 1: that overheated. This This is the new laptop. The old
Speaker 1: one was the one that overheating. That was That was
Speaker 1: my lame attempt to lead into what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: Oh you mean computer viruses. Yes, yes, we recently had
Speaker 1: an article on the feature on the site the ten
Speaker 1: worst computer viruses of All Time, and I thought that
Speaker 1: would be a clever way to lead in. Obviously, Um
Speaker 1: I was wrong. Well, you know, we had a difficult
Speaker 1: time choosing which because you know, there's so many really
Speaker 1: are they really are? And the ones that that we
Speaker 1: picked were chosen for different reasons, and some of them
Speaker 1: were more destructive than others, but others broke new ground
Speaker 1: in virus world. Shenanigan's Yeah, yeah, they caused brand new
Speaker 1: headaches for everybody involved. Um, besides the person who wrote them,
Speaker 1: I suppose. Well, let let's give a little background here. Okay, So, um,
Speaker 1: so computer viruses date back quite a ways. Uh. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's a scientist by the name of John Van Newman
Speaker 1: who theorized way back in ninety nine that it would
Speaker 1: be possible to create a program that could self replicate,
Speaker 1: which is generally what we talk about when we talk
Speaker 1: about computer viruses. There are different kinds of computer viruses. Um.
Speaker 1: The the standard, uh, the original good old computer virus
Speaker 1: that was that would cause a lot of trouble would
Speaker 1: be the kind that would infect your computer and then
Speaker 1: overwrite data and and essentially turn your computer into a
Speaker 1: useless pile of junk. Right those were Boy, those were
Speaker 1: the good old days. Yeah. That was really irritating. It
Speaker 1: meant that you'd lose everything. Even if you could, um,
Speaker 1: even if you could fix your computer, you there was
Speaker 1: a good chance you weren't going to be able to
Speaker 1: retrieve data that had been stored on that computer up
Speaker 1: to that point. Um. Those were nasty. But there are
Speaker 1: other kinds as well that are equally evil. Um. There
Speaker 1: are the computer worms, uh, and there are the trojan horses.
Speaker 1: And together these kind of make up everything we think
Speaker 1: of when we say computer viruses. The virus is really
Speaker 1: sort of used as a blanket term um by the
Speaker 1: security public. I would say, you know, people talk about
Speaker 1: when you hear people talk about viruses, it may actually
Speaker 1: be a worm or a trojan that they're talking about.
Speaker 1: Worm is actually a program that can go by itself
Speaker 1: and replicate itself, rather than piggybacking on another program, which
Speaker 1: is what an actual virus is, right right, the old
Speaker 1: computer viruses usually it was well, I mean always it was.
Speaker 1: It was some a little self replicating program that was
Speaker 1: part of a larger program. So for instance, um, you
Speaker 1: could corrupt a macro in Microsoft word in the old
Speaker 1: days and create a computer virus that way. But a worm, yes,
Speaker 1: as you say, is its own program, it's own applications.
Speaker 1: So as soon as you execute it, that's when it
Speaker 1: activates and and begins to to cause issues. Whereas the
Speaker 1: trojan that gives bad guys the opportunity to really mess
Speaker 1: with your computer, Yeah, it's a it's a program as
Speaker 1: trojan horse you might expect from the name. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: a program that that looks like one thing that actually
Speaker 1: does something else. Entirely. Uh So somebody may say, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, you need to take a look at this file.
Speaker 1: It's the greatest video ever, and you double click on it,
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden you're going, hey, wait, this
Speaker 1: isn't really a video file. But by that point, your
Speaker 1: computer may be infected with something nasty, right, And the
Speaker 1: really clever ones just make you think that whatever program
Speaker 1: you downloaded just didn't work correctly, and so you may
Speaker 1: not even be aware that your computer has been infected.
Speaker 1: You may just think that you've got a hold of
Speaker 1: a faulty file, and and that's that's the worst of it,
Speaker 1: when in reality, someone is using your computer either to
Speaker 1: access information or or create a zombie computer army. We've
Speaker 1: talked about that before, or um any number of really evil,
Speaker 1: icky things that you don't want to happen to your computer. Right, So,
Speaker 1: I guess we can just dive on in and talk
Speaker 1: about some of the ones that made the list. I'm
Speaker 1: sure everyone's just chomping up a bit to find out. Well,
Speaker 1: the first one we were going to talk about today
Speaker 1: is as an actual virus. Melissa, Yes, Melissa Melissa, named
Speaker 1: after an exotic dancer in Florida. Uh, poetry, really, isn't it?
Speaker 1: So what a nice sentiment. Yeah, this was created by
Speaker 1: a guy named David L. Smith. This is uh back
Speaker 1: in and uh yeah, it's an actual computer virus that
Speaker 1: spread um through email. And it was a it was
Speaker 1: a one of the ones we were talking about, like
Speaker 1: a piggybacking on the Microsoft word document. Yep, yep. This
Speaker 1: is the reason you get an alert when you open
Speaker 1: a document and word when it and it has a
Speaker 1: macro in it, and it goes, hey, are you sure
Speaker 1: you want to do this because it has macro's. Well,
Speaker 1: now you know why. Melissa really brought our awareness up
Speaker 1: in terms of what a macro. You know what these
Speaker 1: add ons can do to a simple word document or
Speaker 1: you know, I guess office document or anything that uses macros.
Speaker 1: And uh, it didn't do that much damage really, It
Speaker 1: just it made the list mainly, as you say, because
Speaker 1: it it really raised awareness. Before that point, computer viruses
Speaker 1: were usually spread by someone handing you a floppy disk
Speaker 1: that had a corrupted file on it and you ran
Speaker 1: it that way. Um. You know, that was the pre
Speaker 1: internet days, so it was all social engineering. It was
Speaker 1: all hey, I've got this great game on this U
Speaker 1: why don't you run it? And then you screw up
Speaker 1: your computer. So Melissa really took it to the next level,
Speaker 1: you know, mass distribution. Don't take floppy discs from strangers. No,
Speaker 1: And and that kind of leads us to the social
Speaker 1: engineering is not is not just from the old days.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's still happening today. Uh. And the next
Speaker 1: one is a kind of a good example of that.
Speaker 1: That's the I Love you bug um, which would spread
Speaker 1: through email and you would get a message saying I
Speaker 1: love you, and I think most of us feel warm
Speaker 1: and comforted when we hear those words. Uh, and so
Speaker 1: we you your natural inclination was to open up the
Speaker 1: email find out what this little ghili bob was, and
Speaker 1: you click on it, and that's when it activated. The bug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it copied itself, It added files to your computer's registry,
Speaker 1: replaced other files on your computer with copies of itself,
Speaker 1: and then it started sending itself around to other people
Speaker 1: via email or our Internet relay chat. Yeah I r C.
Speaker 1: Yeah it's pretty bad. And then it downloaded and and
Speaker 1: would execute a password stealing program. So if you started,
Speaker 1: you know, you have all your passwords stored on your
Speaker 1: computer for different different applications, all of a sudden, it's
Speaker 1: sending him back to the originator of the virus, right,
Speaker 1: and this one, the originator of the virus, is one
Speaker 1: of those kind of mysteries we think we know who
Speaker 1: did it, but it's kind of it's impossible to say
Speaker 1: for sure. Now, allegedly the man responsible was Onnell the
Speaker 1: Guzman from the Philippines. But the thing was when when
Speaker 1: he was first being investigated, he was under age and
Speaker 1: so could not be tried as an adult, and uh,
Speaker 1: and it just kind of kind of faded away. And
Speaker 1: then when he became of age, he's sort of in
Speaker 1: a circumspect way kind of but not really admitted to
Speaker 1: being to be the perpetrator. So we're fairly certain that
Speaker 1: he's the man responsible, But you know, it could just
Speaker 1: be a lot of talk. Well I'll tell you, if
Speaker 1: I had done created a virus that did ten billion
Speaker 1: dollars worth of damages over the Internet, I probably wouldn't be,
Speaker 1: you know, willing to raise my hand up and go,
Speaker 1: hey I did this right. No, maybe under a handle, yeah,
Speaker 1: but not not with your real name. So I guess
Speaker 1: we can move on to the next one. I've been
Speaker 1: talking about about moving on. Um. This was one that
Speaker 1: I heard a lot about when I worked in the
Speaker 1: computer security industry. UM. It's s QL slammer, also known
Speaker 1: as sequel slammer. UM. And this, this was a fast
Speaker 1: moving virus. This is this was a classic. In fifteen
Speaker 1: minutes after it was detected, it had already infected nearly
Speaker 1: half of the Internet servers, which uh, in terms of
Speaker 1: you compare that to Melissa or I Love you. They
Speaker 1: were they spread and they spread pretty widely, but not
Speaker 1: like this. This was a big old eye opener for
Speaker 1: the industry. Caused about a billion dollars worth of damage.
Speaker 1: And it uh, it exploitedvulnerabilities within the system. It wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily a program designed. It wasn't like a self replicating
Speaker 1: program in the traditional sense. It was one that that
Speaker 1: exploited of vulnerability that the the virus programmer whom who
Speaker 1: knows who this this guy is, we don't know. Um uh.
Speaker 1: He discovered it and took advantage of it. And there
Speaker 1: there are people who do this for a living, who
Speaker 1: actually look for vulnerabilities that can be exploited. UM. Those
Speaker 1: we usually call white hats. And then we've got the
Speaker 1: people who look for vulnerabilities in order to exploit them
Speaker 1: and actually take advantage of them, not to fix them.
Speaker 1: Those are the black hats, so good old cowboy imagery
Speaker 1: there um from the you know, the wild wild Internet. Yeah. Actually,
Speaker 1: in general, a virus or you know whatever malware if
Speaker 1: you will, um, it's going to take advantage of some
Speaker 1: vulnerability in your system. Basically, when they when the developers
Speaker 1: right code, whether at your operating system or a program
Speaker 1: that runs on your operating system, there's a hole in
Speaker 1: there somewhere and somebody can go in a white hat
Speaker 1: or black hat or both. A lot of times they'll
Speaker 1: publish these vulnerabilities. They're they're picking apart the code and going,
Speaker 1: you know what, if I did this here at this
Speaker 1: right time, I could gain control the entire computer. And
Speaker 1: that's uh, that's why you you know, look down and
Speaker 1: you see your even Mac computers or Windows computers both
Speaker 1: have these things, and they go, hey, there's a new
Speaker 1: software security update. You need to download this update your system. Well,
Speaker 1: that's that's why these these vulnerabilities come to light and
Speaker 1: then you end up patching your system. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: we can move on to the next one. The the
Speaker 1: Sasser virus. Um. Yeah, the speaking of underage hackers. Um.
Speaker 1: The person that developed Sasser and net ski worms was
Speaker 1: a seventeen year old German who never actually spent any
Speaker 1: time in jail because he was under age. But Sasser,
Speaker 1: he apparently wrote both of these worms. But sassor would scan,
Speaker 1: would get on your computer and scan random addresses Internet
Speaker 1: addresses to find other vulnerable computers that it could download
Speaker 1: and copy itself to. So it actively was seeking out
Speaker 1: other machines that it could could do that too, and
Speaker 1: would actually make it impossible for you to turn off
Speaker 1: your machine, right, so it didn't want you to stop
Speaker 1: it from doing its work. You had to unplug your
Speaker 1: computer if you wanted to uh to get it to
Speaker 1: cut it out. And this is a Microsoft Windows virus,
Speaker 1: we should say. It was specifically looking at Windows vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1: So if you were using a different operating system, um
Speaker 1: you were, you were okay, uh from this particular kind
Speaker 1: of worm. UM. That's that's actually an interesting point we
Speaker 1: should make too. I guess we can make it right here.
Speaker 1: You hear a lot about viruses attacking PCs and not
Speaker 1: as many attacking max uh, and you might think, well,
Speaker 1: does that mean that the mac is is autumn etically
Speaker 1: a more secure machine. Well, that's that's not necessarily the case.
Speaker 1: There's this concept called security through obscurity. UM. Part of
Speaker 1: that is if you if not that many people are
Speaker 1: using your system, then there's lesson than incentive to create
Speaker 1: an attack that targets that system. I mean, you're not
Speaker 1: going to hit as many people, So why spend that
Speaker 1: time and energy developing an attack when you could do
Speaker 1: it for a different system that's going to hit a
Speaker 1: lot more people. Yeah, and part of the uh, I'm
Speaker 1: just guessing that part of the reason that hackers create
Speaker 1: these viruses in the first place is to gain the
Speaker 1: notoriety and you know, be the person that took down
Speaker 1: the Internet. So I mean, if you're only gonna take
Speaker 1: down you know, five million computers versus the entirety of
Speaker 1: the Internet, you know, why would you go after the
Speaker 1: small batch? Why wouldn't you try to get as much
Speaker 1: damage as you're you know, you can possibly do if
Speaker 1: you have another ulterior motive, like let's say you've got
Speaker 1: a personal vendetta against a specific website and you want
Speaker 1: to create a zombie network to attack that website and
Speaker 1: bring it down. Obviously you want to try and go
Speaker 1: for whichever system has the widest audience because that will
Speaker 1: make it more effective attack in the long run. Because
Speaker 1: a lot of these viruses, that's exactly what the end
Speaker 1: goal is is to to try and bring down specific entities.
Speaker 1: So we've seen this happened to websites like Yahoo and
Speaker 1: and CNN. Uh, it's it's not unusual, which kind of
Speaker 1: brings us up to the uh. The last one we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about right now, the the the infamous storm worm. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This Uh. Jonathan is saying that this is my my
Speaker 1: pet worm, if you will. But I think it's because
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me. Um. It's it's not really called
Speaker 1: the storm worm. There's actually another pretty mild worm called
Speaker 1: the storm worm, but it's it's known as its real name,
Speaker 1: if you will. These are named by the security firms,
Speaker 1: so um. One of them calls it pea Calm, another
Speaker 1: calls it new War. Uh. But basically it's called the
Speaker 1: storm warm because it propagates through email primarily. UM, it's
Speaker 1: a trojan. So you think you were downloading the newest
Speaker 1: video or some other kind of file. And actually one
Speaker 1: of the original subject lines was, you know, a huge
Speaker 1: storm kills millions in China, and so it was the
Speaker 1: idea was to try and trick you into clicking on
Speaker 1: a on a specific thing within the email um by
Speaker 1: masking it as a news story. Yeah, that's that's your
Speaker 1: social engineering at work again. They're trying to convince you
Speaker 1: that this is a very topical moment. Uh. There were
Speaker 1: some that went out a few months ago about the Olympics.
Speaker 1: You know, they were news headlines, and they're trying to
Speaker 1: get you to do this, or they'll they'll use uh,
Speaker 1: you know, particularly um inflammatory comments, so things like political
Speaker 1: statements like Obama punches Clinton. See the video now and
Speaker 1: you go, oh my gosh, really did that really happen?
Speaker 1: And you go click on it. Then you've downloaded the trojan.
Speaker 1: But the really weird thing about this one is this
Speaker 1: trojan can actually carry different payloads. It could turn your
Speaker 1: computer into a zombie. Uh, it could actually set use
Speaker 1: your computer to send spam to create a denial of
Speaker 1: service attack, and it has been known to carry spam
Speaker 1: denial of service attack payloads that attack specific sources. So
Speaker 1: you know, if there's somebody that speaks out against this
Speaker 1: storm warm and tries to draw attention to it it
Speaker 1: has been I read an article several months ago about this,
Speaker 1: how it has been known to go after those sites
Speaker 1: to try to to shut them up, which is pretty sophisticated,
Speaker 1: very insidious. Yeah right, well, that's that's gonna wrap up
Speaker 1: our discussion about the computer viruses for today. But but
Speaker 1: the article does mention others um the code read viruses,
Speaker 1: the klass virus, nimda uh leap a or up as
Speaker 1: mac mac mac virus, and my doom is also on there.
Speaker 1: So certainly go over to how stuff works and check
Speaker 1: out the ten worst computer viruses of all time. You'll
Speaker 1: definitely learn something that's live right now on how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. We'll talk to you again soon. For
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. Let us know what you think.
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