Slashdot Mirror
The Virus Squad
dncsky1530 writes "Sydney Morning Herald - The Virus Squad - 'A new species has been discovered. So new, it's still unnamed, but researchers are racing to tag it - before it spreads around the world. For the next 10 to 30 minutes, the computer virus or worm is dissected, analysed and identified... "On the day we detected MyDoom, we did another 18 viruses," says Paul Ducklin, Sophos's head of technology for the Asia-Pacific. "There are about 800 new viruses a month. And the unglamorous bit of our work is often the other 798."'"
Also very true. The antivirus companies themselves aren't interested in fixing everything wrong with computer security; what new false dichotomy do they come up with once "pay us for a subscription or your computer becomes a slave to every halfway-savvy hacker out there"?
Old viruses don't die, it seems, they just run out of potential targets as software choices change and security holes are patched. ... we still occasionally see viruses from 1995," Ducklin says.
"You might think that there are some that will almost certainly never be seen again but it is surprising
There's a reason enough to be on your toes and patch your new install as soon as possible.
Back then, at lot of them didn't infect executables, but went for boot sectors like STONED. And there are arbitrary EXE infectors around still, but they tend to get noticed and whacked faster than ones that don't.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I have been working as a consultant for small office and home office users since being laid of from Intel in 2002. The view from the small office and home office is very different from the view from within the IT industry. I've been working to educate my clients on the importance of regular backups, anti-viral protection and firewall protection. I spent the last two weekends removing viruses from computers that were on cable modem connections with no ant-viral software installed and no firewall installed.
I am starting to think that I need to help my clients to protect their data and make their systems hard targets. I'd like to think that the virus problem will be addressed by operating system changes. However, the reality in the small office and home office is that operating system upgrades are almost always tied to the purchase of a new computer. Third party security products will continue to be important as long as users stick with what works for them today without worrying about what might be available tomorrow.
Have you ever had the doubt that viruses aren't actually written by bad bad people, but by some mysterious department in some AV company?
Really, i can't imagine that there are so many (800 viruses/month is SO much) evil-programmers that prefer to spend their know-how writing code they will never get paid for, instead of selling their experience to someone who needs it and earn a lot of money..
Old schoool viruses tended to be designed to do damage. They infected as many files on the system as possible often destroying the file in the process.
This approach is counterproductive if you want it to spread. Modern e-mail worms rarely show much evidence of their presence, if it seems like nothing is wrong then the user won't look for a problem. This leaves the worm free to mail itself to thousands of others and the system is added to the long list of compromised machines at the crackers disposal for DDoS attacks or spam relays.
This is the same reason you don't get any 'wipe your hard drive on a certain date' viruses anymore. It isn't about doing damage it is about infecting as many machines as possible either for the 'fame' or to build up nets of infected drone machines for another purpose.
I am surprised the article didn't mention the real reason MyDoom targeted SCO, it was a diversion. Spammers need new drone machines to send spam from but they don't want the backlash from being connected to a virus so they add in a diversion, the attack on SCO. This took the heat off the spammers and placed it firmly on the OSS community. And it worked, kind of, only recently has the spamming 'features' of MyDoom seen any press. For weeks all that was reported was how it was probably created by a OSS zealot lashing out at SCO.
Well, the article hints at some sort of collusion between spammers and the author of MyDoom, but it seems like this would be the exception, even if it's true. The virus writers are in it for the fun, of course (not to mention revenge).
It also seems possible that the antivirus companies themselves are writing the viruses, then charging to protect users against them, but this also seems unlikely, given the police investigations that inevitably follow major virus outbreaks.
Not true...
Your ISP has every business sense to control your hardware, depending on what kind of customer you are.
Road Runner, during the whole fiasco with some horrid worm I can't remember the name of. Started filtering at customer leased line routers, their own and their upstream provider to hold down the bandwidth consumption. They had red lined their bandwidth and it was effecting their entire customer base.
I'm not saying filtering everything at any point is a good idea, but when it comes to critical situations they have every right to slow the progression of an attack.
I used to get annoyed at Port 25 blocking, but after recent spam/virus hoopla has hit I'm rather glad some people are taking steps to curb the issue.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
All that effort and the anti virus companies still haven't figured out a way to share their work with a common signature file. No wonder there is so much drugery.
Its quite ironic that over the years ive downloaded a hell of a lotta dodgy programs from dodgy sites and P2P and never used an anti-virus tool and the only trouble ive had (never used outlook) is when i've connected an unpatched windows machine to the net and been infected in 3 minutes.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I was thinking about how to design the "perfect" virus... I'm not a proficient enough programmer to even begin writing a virus - so don't come a knocking. But it's an interesting thought experiment.
.cpp file and randomly changes one digit per file (imagine if your report to the board now says 9 Million rather than 1 Million... or if your for...next loop is waiting for an incorrect value)
:-)
Here's what I've got so far...
1) Virus initially comes in as an attachment - user opens attachment (relies on non tech-savy people).
2) Virus scans through "Sent Items" and sends itself to every address that has been sent an attachment in the past. Uses a subject line like "Updated [whatever]" (Tech-savy folk might forget basic precautions)
3) Virus scans through every Excel / Word /
4) Virus wipes itself out after 6 hours (most people only update their virus checker >= 24hours. Once signs of the virus have gone it will be hard to know if you have been infected and which files have been compromised)
5) FBI come and arrest me
Seriously... one has to admire the "I Love You" virus, if only for getting so many tech-savvy people to click through... But what really worries me is the viruses we haven't discovered. What if, say, Winamp has a logic bomb in it? How would any of us know until all our data was corrupted?
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
No Blaster affected, NT, 2k, XP, and I think 2003. However, Microsoft refused to put out a patch for NT citing that it was too old to fix or some other bullshit like that.
I received a few emails with attachments which just smelled like worms, although neither the AV checker I had on my Linux system nor one of the online AV checkers identified them as infected. Curious about this, I saved them in a directory and rechecked them from time to time. It wasn't until 3 or 4 months later that the AV checkers fingered them as worms, and worms that had been floating around for almost a year. (I assume a virus writer must have tweaked the code on an existing virus just enough to make its signature unidentifiable as the original worm.)
"You mean, there's nearly 800 new viruses a month? Wow! I'm sure glad I have my copy of '_______' to protect me from having to know what's really going on in the dark and chaotic world just beyond my telephone/cable connection! And now those terrorists are recruiting psychologists, too? To know what I think in order to get me to click on the activate-virus button? Oi, Crikey! The FEAR!!!! Somebody should bomb somebody! Somebody should take away my rights! I'm sure glad I live in Australia which has the back-bone to support our two other brothers in the Axis of Assholes; the U.S. and the U.K.!"
I also noted that the article neatly throws the whistle-blower under the umbrella of suspicion;
Marvelous. If this meme gets out, the public will then, not be allowed, to police itself. Who wants to be the target of an anti-terrorist investigation, after all?
Modern Media is a joke. It takes a conscious effort to remain calm and light-humored while reading this kind of garbage.
-FL
There may have been 800 new propagating malware programs out there, but I'd be willing to bet that 797 of them were just variants of some existing code. Perhaps anti- "virus" solutions vendors need to classify them this way internally because of their detection methods, but there's no need to feign panic just because some new variant has a different string in it.
I have a problem with the term "virus", because it causes people to view these malware programs as some sort of pathogen, which most are definitely not. The malware does not change its design on its own. Most don't intentionally harm the host computer, either. If I were to classify the most prevalent new malware programs out there, my list would be rather short:
Microsoft Word Macros: Story, Titch, etc. All the same thing. A VB script that attaches itself to an MS Office document. The solution is to either limit what functions can be called from inside MS Office, or give the user a real status and config utility to see what is inside an MS Office document. It's not a "virus", it's just a macro.
Mass-Mailer "Worms": Personally, I think don't like the designation "mass-mailer", I prefer "Outlook for Microsoft Windows Design Flaw Exploiter". These little malware scripts or binaries take advantage of Windows' flawed shell execute functions in conjuction with Outlook's flawed design choice to open automatically every possible data type, instead of just plain text. Every OE malware from Mailissa to Mydoom belongs to this category. Klez could be considered a minor variant because 1) it's binary instead of a script, and 2) it carries with it additional malware programs.
RPC/DOM Worms: Code Red 1 & 2 and the Admin worm (plus all the variants) are all malware programs that effect the same vulnerability. There was another one in this list that caused so much trouble recently, but I can't remember its name.
Internet Explorer as Gateway: All of the "spyware", "adware" and malware that appears in the form of either image formats that exploit vulnerabilities and load code, or malware binaries/ActiveX controls. The latter usually take control of IE and do various naughty things.
Stupid-ware: Sometimes incorrectly called "trojans". Those messages that did not originate from Microsoft but claimed to hold important security updates. It's not a trojan if it doesn't do something useful while it's doing something bad. Just social engineering. Would you take a "cure" from some crazy bum on the street claiming to be a doctor? Oh wait, I forgot, millions of people feed the penis-enlargement spam industry by actually buying those pills.
The only category that worries me is the third, because the vulnerability wasn't obvious to me. The operation of the others is easy to understand, and also easy to avoid. When Mailissa first made an appearance, I promptly banned the use of Outlook and OE as a mail client at work. When we started to get e-mail messages (with attached malware) from the outside, I configured our web-based e-mail client to never display images and to display a warning in big red letters above links to download certain types of attachments. The author of the web-based e-mail is my kind of guy- His program doesn't render HTML, and he steadfastly refuses to make it do so. Klez still managed to get through, but I still have to update our NAT/mail server to scan and dispose of those messages (if only for the fact that they're annoying). I now consider Internet Explorer as a tool only to interf
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!