http://www.hotwired.com/Signal/Flux/Webdead/index.html (The Risc Disc Volume 2, 10/1995)
USA-DOM (apnews.com) -- Across the United States, mouse-potatos emphatically click on hypertext links. Links that are now dead. The fad known as the world wide web ( WWW) has come to its knees due to a subpoena carrying worm flooding its own brand of enforcement upon the net.
The worm, written by a cracker known as Phiber Optik, was unleashed from cyber.sell.com, the home of lawyer duo Canter and Seigel. "We were retained by UNISYS in order to enforce the new GIF picture encoding license," said Laurence Canter. "Mr. Optik was employed by us, on a work release, to find those web sites employing GIF pictures not created by licensed GIF programs." Mr. Canter pauses. "And to take them down," he adds, with a certain gleam in his eyes.
The worm visits web sites, retrieving all GIF graphics and looking for comments inserted into the graphic by licensed GIF development applications. Sites without properly commented GIFs become flooded by requests from the worm, which rotates its domain identification such that the web site operators cannot easily filter the worm's requests out The targeted web site becomes unusable.
Meanwhile, copies of the worm continue on their travel.
"This comment," reports Canter, "is a heavily encoded crypto-key that can only be generated from licensed, proprietary code."
"Bullshit," retorts John Lee, a cracker recently profiled in Wired magazine. "All their encoding is a checksum modulo 255. I can write a three line perl script to add the comment to any GIF file..." And he does, posting it to several USENET news groups.
Readers may never see the fix, however. Due to a bug in the worm (shades of the Robert T. Morris internet worm), the worm does not restrict itself to the machines within the confines of the United States (the only country in which the UNISYS patent can be enforced). Furthermore, worms do not recognize a site that is already being hammered by a worm already and the new worm begins its terroristic attack against the site as well.
"The web portion of the internet ," says Vint Cerf, "is dead. All sites have to disconnect, power down, and wait for the worm code to be flushed. Those damn green card lawyers have done it again and should be arrested immediately."
Don't expect that to happen anytime soon. According to court records, Canter and Siegel procured all proper documents to unleash their worm. U.S. district attorney Dick Gammel confirmed this and expects no state or federal action against the legal firm.
"There's a new marshal in town," says a smiling Canter, "and anarchists will no longer be tolerated." Canter pulls back the lapel of his overcoat, revealing a silver badge encrusted with word 'Cyberspace.'
ejr
Started by Eric Richards (ejr) on Thu, 12 Jan 95 12:30 PST
