the Blaster worm
loresecurity
The August 2003 Windows worm that rebooted PCs worldwide and carried a taunt addressed to Bill Gates.
Blaster exploited the DCOM RPC flaw of MS03-026, crashing machines into reboot loops and aiming a flood at Microsoft's update site; its code carried the message 'billy gates why do you make this possible? Stop making money and fix your software!!'. A teenager who released a variant was arrested within weeks. Together with Slammer the same year, it pushed Microsoft into the security overhaul that produced XP Service Pack 2 and the modern Patch Tuesday culture.
Blaster spread in 2003 through a remote code execution flaw in Windows RPC, requiring no user action at all: an unpatched machine connected to the internet would be infected within minutes. Many were infected while downloading the patch.
Its signature symptom was the machine rebooting on a countdown, because the exploit destabilized a system service whose failure forces a restart. That produced a distinctive failure mode where a computer could not stay up long enough to complete the update that would fix it, and the recommended procedure involved disconnecting from the network first, which was not obvious advice to the affected population.
The lasting consequence was institutional. Blaster and its contemporaries are a substantial part of why Microsoft launched its security initiative, changed default firewall behaviour so a fresh installation was not immediately exposed, and introduced automatic updates as a default rather than an option. The modern expectation that an operating system patches itself without being asked is a direct descendant of a worm that made the alternative untenable.
Also known as: MSBlast, Lovesan