Slashdot Mirror
New Viruses Hit 30-Month High
Mz6 writes "InformationWeek reports that Sophos has analysed and protected against 959 new viruses in May, this is the highest number of new viruses discovered in a single month since December 2001. From Sophos' own TopTen list they continue on to say that the 'Sasser and Netsky worms may have captured the headlines. ...May has seen a noticeable spike in cybercriminal activity, suggesting that even the arrest of Sven Jaschan ...has done nothing to curb the problem.'"
The release of the Phatbot source made most of this possible. Agobot had over a thousand variants because any kid with GCC could change half a dozen strings, pick a new list of tasks to kill, pick a new IRC server to report back to for 'pwn3rship' and then pack the thing up with the executable compressor of his choice.
Not everything should be released under the GPL, I'm afraid.
May has seen a noticeable spike in cybercriminal activity, suggesting that even the arrest of Sven Jaschan ...has done nothing to curb the problem.
I doubt these arrests ever really curb the problem but instead add to it. Those that are captured get their names known world wide and are considered by many l33t hackers, although most are nothing more than script kiddies. Some (Mitnick for one) start successful security consulting businesses and become published authors afterwards.
On the other hand, the monetary rewards for turning in a virus writer might be a better deterrent. I know people that would snitch on their own mothers for a reward!
(not that I want there to be -- I'd be happy if all these sociopathic virus writers found something more productive to do, or just f****d off and died.)
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Your comment sort of does make me think about how many of these new threats/problems are being produced simply because some CS graduate is having a hard time finding that $100,000 a year job and is looking to stick it to the society that fooled him into banking his future on IT...?
You must be a proctologist. I've never seen anyone else with their head so far up their ass before.
Lots of people use antivirus software for the simple purpose of scanning files introduced to their machine BEFORE they are executed, viewed, etc.
And guess what? They're not doomed. Well, technically death comes for us all, but you actually CAN use antivirus software effectively without being relegated to the realm of the imbecile.
If someone believes a single antivirus package is the be-all, end-all of virus prevention, then they're in trouble simply because they're cloaked by a false sense of security.
On the other hand, a user who is conscientious about the code run on their machine, even if the OS isn't one of the most secure, is better off scanning then not.
At the risk of sounding like a bigger loser than I really am:
One time, when I was bored a number of years ago (think, 10-12 years ago), I was browsing through the complete listing of viruses for the Mac that the virus scanner would catch. There were only a couple hundred at the time, and pretty much all of them were trojans.
Something that struck me was the number of political ones. A rather significant percentage were designed to spread a message. I find this interesting, because nowadays, that political element seems to be totally gone. That's not to say they didn't have destructive payloads - I recall that more often than not, they did.
I think it would be a fairly interesting study to hunt down early virus databases and compare them to ones today.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.