14 DAY TRIAL // Security company Symantec has warned of the detection of W32.Uisgon.A, a worm designed to copy itself to network shares. According to the Cupertino-based company, Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows XP are the operating systems affected. Looking at the list provided by Symantec, it is safe to assume that Windows Vista is not impacted by W32.Uisgon.A.
Still, W32.Uisgon.A is not your average piece of malicious code. Not even by far, in fact, it was built as a self-propagating program intended for legitimate purposes. Paul Mangan, Symantec Response Engineer revealed why W32.Uisgon.A was a bad idea. Although the worm was constructed in order to collect samples of viruses that were compromising machines via USB sticks, it managed to get out of hand.
The author put together a program designed to snap the virus samples and move them to a Windows share and he bundled it with a worm created to propagate the program. "Eventually, he intended to terminate the worm by replacing the sample collector on the Windows share with a fixtool. However, his design resulted in the worm infecting machines outside his university and well beyond his control. In particular, USB sticks weren't just plugged into computers within his university network, but computers outside the university as well causing his worm to spread uncontrollably. Once the worm began spreading outside the university he had no way to terminate them as he had no way of accessing them," Mangan explained.
Once W32.Uisgon.A gets in the wild, there is no more difference between a good worm and an average malicious program that is on an infectious rampage. Mangan's perspective on the matter is that a worm is a worm and malicious by nature. The author of W32.Uisgon.A ended up apologizing for his creation: "I created it only to help teachers clean up viruses and perform research... I was unable to control its self-destruction, and it has brought trouble for many people and has not been a good influence, for this I am deeply ashamed of myself. I hope everybody can forgive my error!"