Kingslayer Worm has Governments, Religious Leaders in Uproar
by Matthew Graybosch
by Bob Abooey, Reuters -- 23 December 2008
The hacker known as STORMRIDER, allegedly responsible for the repeated destruction of files owned by the New York City Department of Homeless Services and theft of its operating budget, appears to be seeking a wider stage according to frustrated US Secretary of Information Awareness John Poindexter. Over the last six weeks, computers used by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the National Security Agency (NSA) and Poindexter's Office of Information Awareness (OIA) have been struck by a worm capable of wiping clean a computer's hard disk drives.
Researchers at Symantec, maker of the popular Norton Antivirus software, have dubbed the program used in the attacks Kingslayer, but claim to be utterly unable to formulate a defense against it. According to MIT computer science professor Brian Keating, "Kingslayer, unlike most malicious software, is not restricted to any one operating system. It attacks and destroys not only computers running Windows, but the Macintosh OS, and variants of the Unix operating system as well. It even destroys machines running VMS and Multics (the precursor of Unix)."
Government employees affected by Kingslayer report that their screens display "snow" similar to static on a TV set before rebooting and displaying a short message centered upon the screen. The message is the same for all machines struck by Kingslayer: "Who is John Galt?"
National security experts have ruled out the possibility that STORMRIDER is an Islamic terrorist, given the source of the Kingslayer worm's tagline, the novel "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. Government officials in Great Britain and Japan, also affected by the Kingslayer worm, note that STORMRIDER focuses his attacks solely on the public sector -- computers owned by private individuals and businesses remain unscathed while one government-owned computer after another falls prey.
Users of the geek-oriented blog Slashdot note that Kingslayer has also forced the United States government to admit the existence of the Echelon surveillance system, and its use against American citizens; according to an anonymous poster claiming to work for the NSA, "Echelon was the first to fall to Kingslayer."
However, unnamed sources in the IRS dispute this claim, claiming that their computers were the first to fall prey, and that all tax revenues collected from levies on personal and corporate income, tariffs, and excise taxes have disappeared. Unconfirmed rumors state that individuals are receiving amounts of sums of money equal to the amounts subtracted from their wages for taxes. Lending credence to the rumor are reports from retailers across the world reporting that holiday sales have skyrocketed, currently standing at 300% of last year's sales.
Contrary to governments' claims that they are the sole target of the Kingslayer worm are reports from the Christian Coalition and other religious groups that they too have been struck by Kingslayer. Televangelist Jerry Falwell claims that his church's computers have been destroyed, and over five million dollars in donations taken. Several Muslim clerics based in Iran and Saudi Arabia have issued fatwas condemning STORMRIDER as an enemy of Islam, and clergymen across the country have preached against whoever is responsible for taking money "given to God by the loving hands of his faithful".
Authorities suspect that STORMRIDER himself is responsible for the theft of money from governments and religious organizations across the world, and for refunding taxpayers and donors. Representatives of the Ayn Rand Institute have condemned STORMRIDER for resorting to vandalism and theft, while Lindsay Perigo of the Sense of Life Objectivists and popular science fiction author Matthew Graybosch praise STORMRIDER's actions, stating that governments that violate the rights of individuals possess no rights themselves.
An FBI agent speaking on condition of anonymity says that the FBI has attempted to arrest STORMRIDER, tracing his location through encrypted email messages intercepted by Echelon and the DCS-1000 system. However, STORMRIDER remains at large; he taunts law enforcement agents by leaving a pair of fingerless black leather gloves and three white roses.
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