ancient worm
Tuesday Mar 11 8:35:16 2025
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While reading some forums today, I was reminded of the Blaster worm
from 2003. That was the year I graduated college and I was out of
work at the time, on account of the whole dot-com bust, so I never
had to deal with a Blaster (also called Lovesan) infection myself.
I remember hearing from folks who did that it was a massive pain in
their necks.
The really interesting thing about it (to me, anyway), is that
someone went ahead and wrote a second worm that seemed specifically
designed to eradicate Blaster. It was called Welchia, and it used
the very same vulnerability that Blaster did in order to propagate
itself. So if you were already patched against Blaster, you were
fine. If you weren't, then it would get in using a vulnerability
in Windows's RPC stack, patch that vulnerability, run Windows
Update and delete the Blaster worm. Then it'd schedule itself to
auto-delete by the end of the year 2004.
Nobody ever figured out who wrote the original Blaster worm,
although many organizations had a lot of incentive to do so. They
did manage to catch a kid who wrote a variant of it and he went to
prison for a bit. But 22 years later and the author of the
original is still unknown.
Nor does it seem like anyone knows who wrote Welchia. The best
clue I could find is that there's a message hidden its code
reading:
---
I love my wife & baby :)
welcome 2 china
2004 remove myself
sorry zhong li
---
Was Zhong Li the person who wrote Blaster, and the author of
Welchia was apologizing to them for undoing their work? Was Zhong
Li the same person who wrote both, with the second produced in an
attempt to limit the harm they'd caused? Web search is
unfortunately useless now, so searching for the name just brings up
a bunch of discussions of video game characters, and the chance of
finding out more about that person might be gone forever. Maybe
that's for the best.
====
Also, if you happen to use vim to write your gophermaps, you
can get it to show a visual ruler stop at 68 characters with the
option
:set colorcolumn=68
Or, if you prefer, you can
:set textwidth=68 wrap
to have it automatically restrict your lines to 68 characters.
These can both be invoked at the command-line with the '-c'
argument like:
vim -c 'set textwidth=68 colorcolumn=68 wrap' [filename]
Perhaps as an alias, or part of a script. That way you don't have
to set it in your .vimrc and always be restricted to a certain # of
cols when you're working in other formats.
