windowsupdate.com offline, good move by MS

Red Squirrel · Post by **Red Squirrel** » Sat Aug 16, 2003 10:09 pm

Because of the worm MS brought down the windowsupdate site. In fact, I think they completly removed the dns entry. I think this is a good move by them as it will just make the worm waste it's time as all connections will fail and the fact that there's no dns record will make it fail resolving, so it won't even try to connect to an IP, unless the worm was designed to connect to the IP and not the domain. But since it's probably offline anyway, even accessing the IP will give nothing. (I suppose they took it off line completly)

That url is simply a redirect while http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com is the main one.

Here's an article on this that I found:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1221682,00.asp

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1227, old post ID:10847

wldkos · Post by **wldkos** » Sun Aug 17, 2003 1:58 pm

Good move by MS, but it goes to show you how scared they were. I think I mentioned somewhere else that they should just take down the site for thursday-sunday just to protect themselves.

It would have been neat if this worm wasn't found so soon

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1227, old post ID:10868

jryan · Post by **jryan** » Sun Aug 17, 2003 10:06 pm

The Windowsupdate.com entry has been removed from DNS servers and now no longer points to Microsoft's network and they have no plans to ever reactivate it. As mentioned in my post within the "Global m$ Worm again." topic, the Windows Update functionality built-in to Windows 98 and up pointed to windowsupdate.microsoft.com or a variant thereof and not to Windows Update.com, thus proving an oversight on the part of the virus writer(s).

Archived topic from Iceteks, old topic ID:1227, old post ID:10876