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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.'"
That Sophos antivirus has the somewhat incredible problem of not being able to remove and clean viruses on an infected host... but hey, at least we know they're there.
"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
"Kowing is half the battle!"
On a totally unrelated note.. is it bad when you post comments to your own stories?
Hmmm.
... the school semester ends in May. What are all those CS graduates supposed to do in between being rejected for an interview and filling in a McDonald's application!
This is why security at the operating system layer is so important. How many homes and businesses are broken in to every day worldwide? Tens of thousands, I am sure. Computer crime will escalate in the future, to the point that virus software will probably barely be able to keep up.
Laws aren't going to stop this kind of thing, we need better solutions for security that automatically adapt and defend the end user or system they are on.
I'm investing in a hazmat licence with all the infections I see on enduser computers.
What could possibly go wrong?
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!
With all these viruses out there you should use this as an advantage to show people Linux or at least install Mozilla on their system so they wont open as many possible viruses in the future. Right now I bet there is a record number of people who are sick of using their computer right now. So it is you chance to be the savior and show them linux (Just the simple stuff web browsing, word processing, Printing, playing MP3) if they are sick enough of windows they will let you give linux a try. If they won't then at least see if they are willing to run Mozilla instead of IE.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Of course the sheer number of computers out there and various OS flaws makes for more virus targets, but as for actual viruses, I attribute this to more people just know how to code. Coding has steadily become something with a large 'entry learning cost', to something many more people could do. Whether intentional or not, the average joe is becoming more exposed to the methodology of writing functional pieces of code through macros, application-specific scripts, etc. And as more jobs are offshored and people in other countries learn and become proficient at it, it's as simple as with a larger base of people knowing how to write code, and a constant ratio of all people with bad intentions, it will just keep increasing.
Anyway, my two cents.
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. -Thomas Cardinal Wolsey
Based on the last few analyses I've seen, it appears that occurrences of real "new" viruses, meaning ones made from whole cloth that "advance the state of the art", as it were, haven't really been up that much.
What does seem to be up are "copycat" viruses--viruses that seem to be made from the new viruses. Either people are getting hold of the source to viruses, making a few modifications (to 'set their thumbprint' on them), and releasing them, or else just reverse-engineering the viruses. These "copycat" viruses do appear to be on the upswing. On the other hand, from all reports, the copycats tend to be poorly written and have flaws that either limit their spread or else limit their effectiveness.
The real innovators, though, are definitely getting better every year.
Is anyone doing that kind of analysis: rate of increase of "innovative", more dangerous viruses vs. random, garbage mods of existing ones? That would be an interesting glimpse into the state of the virus "industry".
(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?
What a joke!
"...noticeable spike in cybercriminal activity, suggesting that even the arrest of Sven Jaschan, the German teenager who has owned up to writing Sasser and Netsky has done nothing to curb the problem."
Oh right, so the arrest of Sven was going to solve the problem...? Maybe he wasn't the cybercrime boss after all..? Idiots.
Give it time! 64 bit Windows isn't even widely available yet. Sheesh!
How many of these affect Linux?
Oh, right.
And how is this news? Windows users expect to get hit by viruses; this is nothing new.
When Linux starts getting hit, then I'll take notice.
All those people who claim that Linux is ready for the desktop conveniently forget that it still doesn't support anywhere near the number of viruses that Windows does. A single release of Windows contains more virus enablement than all releases of Linux combined. When it comes down to it, Linux won't ever break into the desktop mainstream until Linus improves support for viruses.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I am sure most of them see it as a joke or some political statement. But the political statement is pretty lame because no one knows what your angry about, "I Made this virus to protest the war?", "I made this virus to protest the the treatment of X", "I Made this virus because I dont like X company". When you get a virus it doesn't seem to spur the ideas that the virus writer wanted to portray.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Say this with me: EDUCATE THE PERSON.
I can't even estimate the number of people with whom I've dealt that have expired, disabled or even damaged anti-virus programs on their computers. Their justification is "I don't know about spending that $X/yr...I don't need it."
For those with Windows versions that have the auto update features available, I can't even estimate the number of people with whom I've dealt that have it disabled, inactive or just ignore it. Their justification is "it slows down my AOL and it keeps popping stuff up or tries to restart the PC."
It's *GREAT* for business and part of me wants to thank the virus writers, spammers and spyware folks...you're providing me with a chance to make some beer money. However, what it boils down to is SOMEONE has to educate the masses...and that someone is all of us; even if we just remind our family and close friends.
Before your little brother or sister [son or daughter] go back to college this fall, MAKE SURE THEIR PC IS SECURE. The college folk with whom I've dealt have epidemics happening on campus...the networks are so overloaded that it's difficult to even fix the machine without taking it home.
You could try:
ClamAV, A GPL virus scanner featuring:
* command-line scanner
* fast, multi-threaded daemon
* milter interface for sendmail
* database updater with support for digital signatures
* virus scanner C library
* on-access scanning (Linux and FreeBSD)
* detection of over 20000 viruses, worms and trojans
* built-in support for RAR (2.0), Zip, Gzip, Bzip2
* built-in support for Mbox, Maildir and raw mail files
I use ClamAV on my mail server and it works pretty good.
There is also an open source windows version called ClamWin Antivirus.
I'd say that social engineering worms are superior to every other type of malware, no matter how elegantly written past viruses/worms may have been. Why bother with rewriting partition tables, privilege elevation exploits, or VB scripts that take over Outlook, when the user will willingly run the code based on a one sentence message from some stranger? If you had told me this 10 years ago, I would have laughed at the prospect that gullibility and ease-of-use would be the two greatest threats to computer security. Amazing.
Sasser may have generated the most complaints for lazy [and/or clueless] admins, but these mailer worms are the biggest headache for me. Unlike Sasser (we have no cases of it), the social engineering ploy is going to continue to be effective until e-mail as we know it changes. Sender authentication + SMTP would fix both spam and virus problems, unfortunately at a great cost in convenience to users. Considering that almost everyone I know receives 90 per cent spam/viruses in their inboxes every day, that inconvenience is looking more trivial every year.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Sophos, in case you've forgotten, are the same bunch of asshats who asserted to the media that Linux advocates were responsible for the MyDoom worm.
This serves to further complicate an already complicated system, and so strange side effects are more likely to pop-up (no pun intended). Such as between badly written printer drivers and firewall software, of all things.
Foolishly, a couple weeks ago I volunteered to help a friend out with his home computer. Of course, it was practically locked up with all the crap he had on there. I re-installed it (XP Home), put on the cr. updates, got him set up with Mozilla, AdAware, Spybot S&D, and ZoneAlarm.
I even talked him into getting his family members to use a limited account on the system, to hopefully keep the system as clean as possible for as long as possible. (However, I now realize that many games and other apps don't run properly under anything but an Admin account... so what's the use of that? Growl...)
Printer was working, everything. So I handed it over to him, and a couple days later he calls me to tell me that the printer stopped working. In his effort to be helpful, he clumsily re-installed the printer drivers, but with the old version, not the new. I got it straightened out again, and after some research, discovered that his printer driver (for an HP Photosmart 7350), has some kind of funky problem with the latest version of the free Zone Alarm. But I managed a workaround to this by having him restart his printer driver service. That was yesterday.
Now, something else has happened to the printer, the goddamned thing won't print at all, and re-installing the printer drivers makes not ONE fucking difference.
So what's my point (other than the one under my hat ha-ha)?
1) We have to try to protect ourselves from all the low-lifes trying to own our systems, and in so doing, make our systems even more complicated and difficult to get them to perform the tasks we have them for in the first goddamned place.
2) No matter how much you straighten out somebody's system for them, they can balls it right up again within a short span. Only this time, it's YOUR fault. (I thought of keeping the admin password only to myself for the trial period, but as I mentioned, in order to use it for games, they have to log in as Admin. So they can change anything, install anything, and then play innocent when it breaks.)
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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.