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Virus Writers - The Enemy Within
Slob Nerd writes "An interesting read from todays Observer "He's 21, he's got dreadlocks, likes punk bands... and his hobby could wreck your computer in seconds. Clive Thompson infiltrates the secret world of the virus writers who see their work as art - while others fear that it is cyber-terrorism.""
Whenever I disassembled viruses or worms, I had to scream. Even in the good old DOS-times and even with bootsector viruses, where size was an important factor, they were simply horrible written. (i.e. unnecassary bloated)
While some may imply in their posts, that virus writers are technically skilled, I've yet to see a single example of beeing better than the avarage bad programmer...
It's not like I don't have appreciation for the fine arts, but this is taking it too far, it is almost to the extent of patronizing virus writers.
Ok fine, what if someday, a student doing research in microbiology decides, just for the sake or fine arts, I'll release a mutant plague bacteria...
I'm always skeptical of stories like this. Everytime there was a story where I knew the people and facts directly, the story was usually a mish-mash mixed or invented to sex up the story.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I don't belive they are completelly skilled. I would pay to see one of these VB virus writers to build an application which can improve our OS's or Networks.
Like the elders say it takes 10 years to a three grow but only 10 minutos to take it down. It's the same with computer virus.
Umm. Slight absence of any mention of virus writing for profit: there's enough evidence that a number of recent virii were mainly about installing SMTP Relays on infected machines to propogate spam, or leaving a backdoor open so that this could later be done.
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Or else installing DDOS software aimed at Spamhaus servers, or leaving backdoors open for same.
So. Art: Check. Vandalism: Check. Profit Motive: Check. Insubstantial "infiltration" by journalist: Check.
Ferinstance
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/12/03/1
- Oops. There goes Spamhaus
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/
- most of this week's crop install backdoors.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20040221
- Your IP Addy for sale to a spam-merchant near you...
That's usually the case with any subject! Every movie, documentary, or article that I've seen or read and have had personal experience with has been a load of bunk. I've been interviewed for numerous newspaper and magazine articles and they very rarely use any of my quotes in context. They'll usually intentionally remove the context to twist words to mean whatever agenda they're trying to push.
My personal experiences with the media have basically ruined my ability to enjoy anything anymore. Since I know for a fact that virtually every story I've contributed to has been embellished by the authors to increase its entertainment value, I assume that any story that's been done about a subject I'm not personally familiar with has been tainted as well. And, most of the time, I'm correct. A simple five minute Google or encyclopedic search on the subject gives me more accurate data than the story that I'm following up on.
PepperHacks - Hacking the Pepper Pad
Let look at a lot of these exploits, they generally are .scr, .vbs, .bat, etc files. By blocking these attachments by default you're going to avoid most attempts at compromising your machine.
.exe to zip it because your mailer doesn't support executable extensions. If you get a bounce back or a message saying "I didnt send you an .exe" then you can safely assume the file is no good and just delete it or set your mailer to auto-delete.
Sure, this is old hat to slashdotters, but I think it would behoove all email client writers to do this by default as MS does now. Now, that leaves us with macro word/excel viruses, other exploits, and the zip files themselves. The first two can be taken care of by a competent virus scanner or system patching and the latter forces the user to open the zip archive thus revealing the true extension (most compression utilities do this) and copies the file(s) to some location thus giving the virus scanner more of a chance to check the thing for viruses.
Its far from a perfect solution, but it will make people sensitive to file extensions and file types. It will also save disk space and bandwidth by compressing attachments (or even the message itself). Added functionality can be added like signed zip archives, AV hooks into zip programs, etc. Heck, the zip format already provides a cross-platform encryption scheme. Sure its not 3DES/RSA or anything, but it sure beats nothing (especially for those worried about sniffing).
This is essentially the setup many of the companies I work with have. You get your pdf, doc, xls, etc but anything executable is either deleted or quarantined. I don't see why email clients written for residential customers can't do the same.
Data loss isn't even an issue, the worst case scenario is asking the guy who sent you that
This can be done in three steps:
1. Implement auto-zipping. Geeks and security sensitive people will probably enable this by default. Or it should be default with newer version of mailers.
2. Once a significant amount of traffic is in the zip format set your mailer to reject all executables. It also could auto-remail the person sending you executables. (this may be exploited by spammers looking for live email addresses).
3. Watch zip vendors work closer with AV vendors to provide better protection from viruses in zip archives.