The #1 Computer Security Threat Just Evolved – RCE Worm
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…