Was talking to Joshua in between rehearsals for thursday's piano concert.

Learning alot of stuff from the bugger, he almost freaks me out sometimes.

Like, how he taught me how to remotely control another person's pc from your computer, and how to watch their screen. Idiot caught his friends surfing porn even.

Then he explained the blaster worm to me.

Everyone thinks that the blaster worm is supposed to shut down and crash your computer. But what they don't know is that the crashes and shut downs are actually a side effect. A bug in the program.

Using window's vulnerability pipelines, the virus is supposed to get in your computer, and sit down and wait. What's fantastic is how the virus manages to accomplish this. However, to get through, it must first get through to the mainframe. This is where the bug comes in. There are different entry points to the mainframe through windows xp, and 2000. Can the virus detect what OS you are using? No. So it uses a random trigger to randomly pick an OS and jump in. If it picks the right one, mission accomplished. However, if the random trigger sends it to the wrong OS - crash. Then thsi bug wouldn't be so bad, IF the virus didn't run it's entry procedure very often. Hence, the probablity of it picking the wrong OS and crashing is high.

The blaster worm wasn't meant to hurt your computer. The program was set to lie dormant in your pc, then attack the microsoft server in unison with a D Dos doman. That's when 999999999 computers whoh ave the virus nail the server at one go.

Why a D Dos attack? Because Microsoft's server is so advanced, no other server or pc can out-compute it. Hence, a unified attack would be succesful. The program would flood the server with queries so fast that it would become unstable and crash.

Did it work? Even after the fixes and virus scan updates were spread throughout the net? No one knows. Because Microsoft shut down its server at the time the program was set to attack.

Hence, the message asking Bill Gates to fix his applications before releasing new ones was never sent to the server.

Lesson learnt: Always test your software properly on the variations of your target audience before releasing it.