The Sussex Police force’s IT system has been brought to its knees by W32/Nachi – the ‘good’ worm that was supposed to eradicate MSBlast. The Sussex Police force has been hit by a worm that has knocked out their office computers and forced workers to switch to back-up systems. Emergency calls are not being affected. The organisation confirmed to ZDNet UK that it has been hit by the W32/Nachi worm, which is a variant of the MSBlast worm that started spreading around the globe early last week. Nachi was dubbed the ‘good’ worm because it seeks out PCs that are vulnerable to the MSBlast worm and then downloads the appropriate patch from Microsoft’s Web site to fix them. Additionally, it will delete itself from an infected machine the first time it is booted up in 2004. However, the worm is not a good idea, said Joe Hartmann, North American director for antivirus research at security software firm Trend Micro. “This is just a regular worm like anything else,” he said. “In the end, it is going to do more trouble than good.” The problem is that although Nachi has good intentions, it sends a great deal of unwanted traffic over a network as it tries to spread to other computers. In addition, if several computers download the patch from Microsoft at the same time, it could slow network performance, Hartmann said. Full Story
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