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Gone are the days when a full staff of bodyguards were needed and nowadays a full set of
advanced cameras such as the ones pro-vigil provides are all we need.

SQL Slammer Crushed Businesses and Brought the Web to a Crawl Because Nobody
Expected It

A virus that focused on web servers, SQL Slammer caused hundreds of millions of dollars in
damages within only a few minutes. The virus spread so quickly that its number of hosts
doubled every few seconds. It infected nearly half the servers that keep the internet running.

The virus focused on a vulnerability in SQL server software, so most home computers were not
affected.

However, the internet slowed to a crawl, and many server dependent organizations suffered
devastating outages. Among the worst outages were those experienced by Continental Airlines,
Bank of America’s ATM service, and Seattle’s 911 service.

Part of the problem was that many of the businesses attacked had no contingency plan in place
for such an emergency. It isn’t enough to simply have powerful security and anti-virus
measures, you should also have a plan in case your security measures fail.

MyDoom Threatened to Bring Down Google Because Millions Opened Unknown
Attachments

Days after 2004’s MyDoom began spreading itself via email, it was declared the fastest
spreading computer virus ever. MyDoom started on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks and
continued its spread via email. Unlike common computer viruses though, MyDoom didn’t simply
get new email addresses from a host’s account, it also searched Yahoo and Google for
additional email addresses.

At its worst, as many as 1 out of every 4 emails sent contained the MyDoom attachment. Once
millions of computers were infected, MyDoom’s collective billions of web searches per second
crushed the response time of the overwhelmed search engines.

Ultimately, the virus could only spread the email attachment itself though, since users had to
actually click on the Trojan horse file for their machine to become infected.

That means that every single one of these users opened at least one file without knowing what it
was!

The lesson from MyDoom was that people must be better educated on not opening unknown file
attachments or downloads. Curiosity can and does kill the cat.

6 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – June 2015 Edition
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