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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."'"
Maybe a lot of /. readers are too young to remember real viruses, or to have played around/collected them, but its been a decade since a real infectuous virus has gone around.
If it can't infect any arbitrary EXE file, its not a virus, its a trojan or a worm, depending on wether or not its a moronic user or a security hole that allows it to enter the system.
Well, I have to wonder how well the whole antivirus industry is handling the problem; why release virus signatures instead of just changing the entire underlying security system in the operating system? It's things like viruses that make SELinux seem like a very good idea to me.
It's things like SELinux that make the status quo seem like a very good idea to the antivirus industry.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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"?
"There's still a big perception out there that only broadband users need one," Lee says. "Everyone needs a firewall, along with antivirus."
This rings all too true. If forwarding ports for certain applications wasn't such a pain in the ass, I would say make ISPs require firewalls or find a way to have some sort of personal firewall for their connection that they can access from the internet and change the settings on. Just a thought.
This would bring up other problems, but it'd at least stop a lot of problems with trojans and open relays.
How does that go?
"I AM PR3PAr3D T0 0ff3R TH3 2um 0F tHR33 BaGz 0f Ch33zY P00fS 4 a 3l33T P2Ych0!og!st!!!"
"While you clearly have abandonment issues, the practice has been hard up for money lately. Very well, I accept. But first, tell me about your mother."
Look, it doesn't take a psychologist to explain that when you sit the average person in front of a computer, they become a mouse-clicking fool. No amount of emergency IT sessions with the staff explaining precautionary tactics involving attachments is going to change that, and if any psychologist recruitment is necessary it's to explain why the average person keeps clicking attachments to messages in obviously broken English.
That's why blaming software vendors like Microsoft is stupid. Will four ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO RUN THIS warnings before allowing the execution of an attachment do any more than three?
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.
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..
...safe in the knowledge that the VIRUS SQUAD are dissecting viruses for me AS WE SPEAK!
ACTIVATE TEAM VIRUS SQUAD! GO FOR GLORY!
But how often do you run across a computer you have to service with expired virus subscriptions? It seems to happen to me quite a bit. I suppose M$'s virus scanner mentioned earlier on /. might help, but that reeks even more of conspiracy than the current "protection money" setup does.
Rather than bundling a questionably legal virus scanner into their next service pack, Microsoft should perhaps add a tool that helps to lock down permissions on NTFS volumes, creates unpriveleged accounts for users and various services, etc. Even with the multitude of security holes, Windows can be made a lot harder to mess with, if you put a little work into. The key here is privelege seperation.
Some security companies do give back to the community. GRISOFT offers a free version of AVG Anti-Virus 6.0 for single home users. Zone Labs offers a free version of the Zone Alarm firewall.
Do you know of any other companies that offer free anti-viral or firewall software?
"There are about 800 new viruses a month. And the unglamorous bit of our work is often the other 798."
Anti-virus vendors that consider a mass outbreak of a worm to be 'glamorous', compared to the 'unglamorous' stuff that doesn't get as much publicity? It might sound daft, but consider that they (should) put the same amount of work into each and every virus - i.e. preventing it - there shouldn't really be an issue with how glamorous something bad is.
Analyse it, deal with it, out the door, next virus is how it should be. I'd hate to think how they'd deal with biological virus outbreaks...
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
"If you unblocked port 135 [an access point Blaster targeted] you would be found by Blaster," Lee says, adding that it would just be a matter of time.
This happened when I installed a (legal) copy of Windows 2000 on my GFs old machine. Boom! Infected with Blaster on the first five minutes on the net, trying to D/L a firewall. Not to speak of the servicepacks... It happened so fast, I thought there was something wrong with the modem drivers, I downloaded via an iBook. I spent a lot of time getting that machine up. But as the family of the GF saw what happened, three persons became Apple converts that evening.
My GF now has an iBook and is more productive on a computer than ever.
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.
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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?
There is AntiVir which provides its software free for personal users, however it's in German only. I've used it on my Win2k system for a few years now. As far as I know it doesn't integrate with any e-mail-clients, but it recognized viruses in attachments as soon as I saved them to disk.
Well, just found out they do have an English version...
It's got auto-updates, Outlook add-on module, etc. All good. They want some info in lieu of registration, but it's non-spammy/invasive
You can download it from here if you're so inclined.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Avast, beyond being a quite satisfied user of their software.
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
Open Safari. Go to /.
Virus story. Yawn.
Wonder how people can still defend Windows with that "it does what I want" or "it gets the job done" excuse.
Scroll.
Get on with doing what I want and getting the job done.
(posting no bonus. mod off topic if you must. just an aside.)
- I am made of meat.
F-Prot antivirus is available for free for home users, and runs on Linux, Windows, BSD, DOS and Solaris. For the Unix-based systems, there is a nice GUI front end called xfprot.
Smoothwall is a "best-of-breed Internet firewall/router, designed to run on commodity hardware, and to give an easy-to-use administration interface to those using it. Built using open source and Free software, it's distributed under the GNU Public License".
Follow me
A completely passive method (will not piss off local admins) is to run port monitoring software on your PC and watch port 3127; Any machine trying to connect to port 3127 is likely to be a Mydoom infected machine. Telnetting to port 3127 on one of these machines will get a login prompt, which indicates an infected zombie monitoring that port for commands. I ran portsentry on a Linux box (had to edit the config file to watch 3127) and within a couple of hours found three infected machines on our local network.
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!