short essay Dystopia: Worm destroys half of the computers

[Georgi Guninski]

I wanna be a paperback writer ;)
Updates will be on http://j.ludost.net

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Dystopia: Worm destroys half of the computers

by Georgi Guninski, 2017-12-02 ver. 1.0

Allegedly Steven Hawking said:

“I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something
 about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is 
purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.”


On a cold sunny winter day a worm destroyed half of the computers.

It exploited few zero days in the BIOS remote management system which is OS agnostic.

By design the worm was destructive. It flashed all firmware it could and did
physical damage turning the device into unbootable “brick”. Wiped all data from
device's storage too.

If the worm could connect to the management port the device was essentially
owned. Antivirus warez didn't help since they didn't have a change to note
any “anomaly”.

The implications on the real world were severe. Severely malfunctioning
were shops, hospitals and a lot of other stuff.

Older generation worms like ILOVEYOU, WannaCry looked like wanted security
updates compared to the worm.

Some service providers were so little screwed up, if they wanted to be up, they
had to offer free services to all. Cynics joked this was the first real
beta testing of communism.

Crazy people claimed Pink Floyd predicted the mess around 1980 by singing
“Waiting for the worms to come”.