New.com reports on a new worm infecting Linux/Apache servers. (A “worm” is a malicious standalone program that propagates on its own, without requiring any human action.)
A new worm that attacks Linux Web servers has compromised more than 3,500 machines, creating a rogue peer-to-peer network that has been used to attack other computers with a flood of data, security experts said Saturday.
It was only a matter of time before this happened. Linux in particular, and open-source software in general, are not immune to malware such as worms and viruses. Linux has gotten a free pass for a while, because malware developers, like all software developers, tend to target their code for the most popular platforms. Now that Linux is so popular on servers, it becomes a more natural target for malware.
Of course, whoever did this is a criminal and deserves to be punished.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that this serves as a wake-up call for those who view the poor state of computer security as a “Microsoft problem” or a “closed-source problem.” All software is riddled with bugs, and all security-critical software is riddled with security-critical bugs. We just don’t know how to build large, complex programs without them. Rather than pointing the finger at others, who might or might not have a few more bugs than we do, we all need to figure out how to do radically better than any of us are doing today.
