grey goo strikes again

looks like one of the more interesting things in security blog land today was a service outage over the weekend in second life caused by the infamous grey goo (virtual virus hits second life, grey goo hits second life, worms in second life, security, a human problem)... i'm not sure why they all chose this particular time to take notice of the grey goo in a malware context but at least now i know i'm not the only one who thought it was an interesting instance of game-related malware...

this particular case was pretty unremarkable, though, unless you take the golden rings (from sonic the hedgehog) into account... otherwise it really wasn't a big deal - it's not the first time and it's not the worst time... presumably the first time was the worst time because linden labs hadn't yet developed tools to cope with the problem of self-replicating code in the game, but now they have and this latest case saw new logins blocked (if you were already in the game you could generally stay in) for less than half an hour while they cleaned up the mess (as opposed to the head scratching and long-delayed resolution they went through when the problem first came up in october of last year)...

of course there's more to the story of grey goo than most seem to be reporting... last month i wrote about it, about it's classification, and about the counter measures linden labs developed - essentially behaviour blocking technology... the fact that grey goo continues to pop up from time to time illustrates the broader principle that behaviour blocking can't completely solve the virus problem... i suspect that the quick cleanup this time points to what essentially boils down to a signature based removal technique as well (which, for the time being at least, is a perfectly reasonable way to recover from the special cases that get around the primary defense), so linden labs continues to be an interesting example of anti-malware techniques and technology developing in the apparent absence of but parallel to the anti-virus industry...