On Fri, 19 Apr 2002, Ron DuFresne wrote:

We caught NIMDA extrememly early because one of our malcode researchers
put up a worm catcher to track Code Red variants and we had it deployed in
several places (~14 countries)  "New" worms get mailed and
analyzed pretty quickly, old ones get counted for statistical purposes.

I called it as viral about the same time all the AV guys did based on some
early cleaning attempts (they were disassembling initial samples, I was
playing with client-side infection.)

> dramatic psread over short time for both.  I just think the survey is
> flawed, perhaps due to a limited data set <respondents>.

The normal sampling is (AFAIR) 1000 companies with >=1000 computers.
Don't quote me though, I tend to forget those things shortly after
reading them.  The methodology is definitely in the survey though, and I'm
pretty sure there's a NIMDA section.

> I still track both on a very small network, and still see signs of both on
> systems throughout the US and various other countries in the world:

Almost all of the NIMDA probes I still get come from .kr.  What I see
from the US is generally from home systems, not companies.  I feel that
state and local governements got hit harder than corporations, but don't
have any data to back that up.

> The numbers might well be small in the survey conducted due to also so
> many still lacking a clue they are in fact infested <smile>.

I can't remember if we went out and sampled the Internet randomly for
NIMDA, it certainly wouldn't be all that difficult to do.  I just
double-checked the numbers, and we had a 2.4% verified incidet rate in
our customer base (multiple hundreds of customers.)  The 78% number still
stands in everything I have here.  If you're aware of someone who has
conflicting data, I'd like to see it.

> > I'll have to check something before I theorize why the general rate wasn't
> > significantly higher.

MS01-044 was a rollup patch put out in August, and a fair number of
companies applied it to at least external facing sites, I think the
"real" fix was prior to that (MS00-078?), and that probably helped.  I
also seem to recall some resiliancy in some versions of IIS- but I can't
find any notes.  There were also several companies who took proactive
shutdown action based on their Code Red experiences.

I have data suggesting that NIMDA went throgh 14 countries worth of
address space in less than 25 minutes.  So, I doubt that our NIMDA
specific alerts had much to do with mitigation (better than a 30x
decrease is significant IMO.)  We did make sure that our customer base
didn't have ../ issues several times in months prior, and in doing so,
ensured that CR didn't get a foothold for NIMDA to exploit as well.

Paul
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Paul D. Robertson      "My statements in this message are personal opinions
[EMAIL PROTECTED]      which may have no basis whatsoever in fact."

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