Talk:Student Projects:Cyber Insecurity

Large-scale attacks: Viruses and worms

Jesse Ruderman: It looks like this group is concentrating on terrorism, so I'll pose my questions in terms of terrorism.

Most worms so far has come from bored teenagers (including me 6 years ago, see my user page) and from spammers. Bored teenagers and spammers have demonstrated how easy it is to compromise a huge number of systems. So far their most destructive payload was the one that took down Google for several hours. If a terrorist were to write a virus, what payload would they choose to maximize terror+damage: deleting users' files, making users' saved porn and other files public, distributed computing to aid a nuclear or biological attack, or something else? Where would a terrorist worm come from: a bored Islamic-extremist teenager or someone paid by Bin Laden to write the worm? Why are we doing next to nothing to secure our computers, despite the knowledge that a worm could do much more damage than current worms if it wanted to?