Blaster (computer Worm) - Creation and Effects

Creation and Effects

According to court papers, the original Blaster was created after a Chinese cracking collective called Xfocus reverse engineered the original Microsoft patch that allowed for execution of the attack.

The worm spread by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish cracking group Last Stage of Delirium in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 and later in MS03-039. This allowed the worm to spread without users opening attachments simply by spamming itself to large numbers of random IP addresses. Four versions have been detected in the wild.

The worm was programmed to start a SYN flood on August 15, 2003 against port 80 of windowsupdate.com, thereby creating a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) against the site. The damage to Microsoft was minimal as the site targeted was windowsupdate.com instead of windowsupdate.microsoft.com to which it was redirected. Microsoft temporarily shut down the targeted site to minimize potential effects from the worm.

The worm contains two messages in its source code. The first:

I just want to say LOVE YOU SAN!!soo much

Which is why the worm is sometimes called the Lovesan worm. The second:

billy gates why do you make this possible ? Stop making money
and fix your software!!

is a message to Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the target of the worm.

The worm also creates the following registry entry so that it is launched every time Windows starts:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\windows auto update=msblast.exe