News.com has an update on the spread of the Slapper P2P virus, including a change in the number of reported infected servers, down to 7,000 from MSNBC’s report of 17,000.
Cnet also reports that the virus’ spread has reached a plateau, and that it’s DOS features have rarely been activated. Most tellingly, experts are referring to Slapper in the past tense.
There is also talk that these P2P viruses could be the future of viruses. “If refined, the worm could be released with the code to exploit the latest vulnerability–the SSL flaw that Slapper takes advantage of is about seven weeks old–and then three days later, the aggressor would have its own attack network. The peer-to-peer network would hide the attacker’s identity, since any computer on the network could issue commands to the others. And using encryption, the attacker could reduce exploitation of the resulting network by others”
Read it here.
