The #1 Computer Security Threat Just Evolved – RCE Worm

 

 

RCE worm @taviso

Let me tell you a story about a worm.

This worm’s name was Welchia, and it came into the world late one night in mid-2003.

I was early career IT at that time, working Tier 2 Helpdesk in a very large (hundreds of thousands of users) enterprise.  We had server farms across the world and I did normal things like resetting user profiles, fixing file shares, and repairing programs.

One morning, I was managing a server overseas when it abruptly went offline.  I tried to reach the other servers at that site and none of them responded.  Other employees around me confirmed that the network link was down.

About one minute later, I lost my connection to the server farm on the west coast.  At this point, we started to get alarmed.

Then a few seconds later, server farms in the mid-USA went offline.

We are now in full panic mode.  Is this World War III?   Are we under attack?

And then two things happened simultaneously – our own computers lost connection to…