SCI/TECH: Emerging Internet Threats 4/26/2004

Just a quick update on the "Sasser" situation" -the infections seem to have peaked, with estimates ranging from 1.5 to 18 million computers infected. Best of all, the German authorities, with help from computer industry insiders, have discovered the author of "Sasser" and gotten a confession from him.

Sasser Worm Suspect Confesses to German Police
HANOVER, Germany (Reuters) - German police have arrested an 18-year-old man who confessed to creating the "Sasser" computer worm, believed to be one of the costliest Internet attacks.

In what police called the largest case of its kind, the computer science student was arrested on Friday after software giant Microsoft gave German authorities a tip-off, police said.

It was not clear if the tip-off came from someone seeking the $250,000 bounty placed on the heads of virus authors by Microsoft and other companies.

Originally posted by spacedoubt
Patches, (or patch d'jour lately it sems).

What are your favorite Programs for Patch Deployment
over a network?

Right now we're using something called GFI languard.
Some of the guys are having a bit of a time with it's idosyncrasies, but it's working pretty well for us.

We DO have a mix of Win OS's, NT4, W2K, XP. That was part of the problem of getting up to speed.

We are such a small company that I have been doing patch testing and evaluation on off-line servers then manually applying patches to the production servers. Since I am moving away from that responsibility and the company is growing, we are trying out Microsoft's own Systems Management Server (SMS) 2003 .

We currently use GFI's anti-spam product and have been very happy with it and their product support.