Dave Aitel, vulnerability researcher at New York-based Immunity Inc., unveiled a research-level demo of the "Nematode" framework at the Hack In The Box confab in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, insisting that good worms will become an important part of an organization's security strategy.
"We're trying to change the way people think," Aitel said in an interview with Ziff Davis Internet News. "We don't want people to think this is impossible. It's entirely possible to create and use beneficial worms and it's something businesses will be deploying in the future."
For years, security experts have debated the concept of using good worms to seek and destroy malicious worms. Some believe that it's time to use the worms' tactics against them and build good worms that fix problems but the chaos and confusion associated with self-propelled replicating programs have left others unconvinced.
Whats old is new again! Dr Fred Cohen invented computer viruses and invisioned "helpful viruses." He proposed a COM and EXE infector that compressed the actual executable. Xerox invented the "network worm" in Palo Alto in the late 70s. It would transfer from machine to machine on the network, performing maintenance. They never could write it properly and the worm keep crashing machines. A few years back, we had worms which would patch the vuln other worms exploited because if both worms existed on a box it would crash.
