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Can you explain why you find this idea of fast moving viruses so improbable? Just from the way the internet works, I wouldn’t be surprised if every reachable ho
by echoangle 2y ago
Can you explain why you find this idea of fast moving viruses so improbable? Just from the way the internet works, I wouldn’t be surprised if every reachable host could be infected in a few hours if the virus can infect a machine in a short time (a few seconds) and would then begin infecting other machines. Why is that so hard to imagine?
- SoftTalker 2y agoProper firewalling for one. "Every reachable host" should be a fairly small set, ideally an empty set, when you're on the outside looking in. And operating systems aren't that bad anymore. You don't have services out of the box opening ports on all the interfaces, no firewalls, accepting connections from everywhere, and using well-known default (or no) credentials. Even stuff like the recent OpenSSH bug that is remotely exploitable and grants root access wasn't anything close to this kind of disaster because (a) most computers are not running SSH servers on the public internet (b) the exploit is rather difficult to actually execute. Eventually it might not be, but that gives people a bit of breathing space to react. Most cyberattacks use old, unpatched vulnerabilites against unprotected systems combined with social engineering to get the payload past the network boundary. If you are within a pretty broad window of "up to date" on your OS and antivirus updates, you are pretty safe.
- echoangle 2y agoThe focus seems to have been the time limit though. All the reasons you mention are just that there aren’t even that many targets.