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Windows Viruses up Sharply in 2004
Brad1138 writes "MSNBC has an article regarding the proliferation of Windows Viruses and collaboration among virus writers and spammers. Also mentions the likelihood that viruses for Linux and handhelds will see a sharp rise."
The debut of their new documentary Viruses Up, Windows Down.
Oh, and before anyone says this is Microsoft/MSNBC bias against Linux, it's a Reuters article available from many other sources and seems based on the same Symantec information as the earlier zombie story.
Well since a lot of the big ISP's have banned incoming requests or outgoing requests to most windows ports (135, 445, 5000, et cetera) there aren't as many attacks anymore so even when a new exploit is released machines are compromised much less often.
I did battle with a xp machine yesterday that got zombied. This thing was blasting out thousands of mail messages. It tried nearly everything to keep me from removing it from the machine, morphing, auto reinstall, hiding in different locations, modifying start registry at every shutdown. This is not your average script kiddy stuff somebody wrote it that knew what he was doing. Spybot, norton, clam or adware never even recognized it. This is a machine behind a firewall, virus scanning, spybot scanning etc but it still got infected through yes you guessed it Internet Explorer, and yes it had every security patch installed.
Before I left I disabled internet explorer and installed firefox. It may still get infected through outlook or some other means but I made it one hell of alot harder by switching them to firefox.
Got Code?
To target Slashdot.
You heard me right. A recent trojan actually used Slashdot to post the IP addresses of infected hosts to a public reading spot, so that the worm authors could collect these addresses and break into the systems. The infections were posted to sid=31337, one of Slashdot's two remaining "troll" discussions. You can click that link to see the approximately 4000 infections that posted their IP addresses (along with a random hash to prevent duplicate messages and defeat the "lame" filter) to the discussion.
Cmdrtaco responded to this terrorism by closing the sid, proving that terrorism works.
If guns kill people, then CmdrTaco's keyboard misspells words.
Some news for you: I happen to do work on my PC. This includes office type tasks, communication by email and sometimes IM, web browsing, software development, graphics work and a load of other stuff. I have to make sure my data is safe in case of nasties like a hard disk failure, which happenned a few months back (easy - DVD-R root fs + rsync'ed /home). I expect to be able to jump on and off my PC because I work from home to make childcare easier.
That's what I do. No games, no dicking around with software I don't have a use for. (Oh yeah, I post on /. though ;-)
I use Linux (or one of the BSDs on my production boxes) because it just works. I can get what I need done and get away without being bothered by the 'computer'. No rebooting, no intrusive update process ie: Windows Update popping up messages asking me stuff while I try and work, no downtime due to viruses, no wasted web browsing sessions due to popups, no wasted email time due to spam, worrying about if my keystrokes are being logged when I buy stuff online.
Contrast this to my two groups of friends who continue to use Windows:
The first group are not generally computer literate. They've mostly given up on their computers as unusable. Spam, viruses, trojans, popups, crashes, reboots. Poor sods. They really want to get stuff done, but the 'computer' just gets in the way.
The second group is probably the user I was when I was about 13 or 14. They have to have the latest, greatest cracked or keygened software, but they don't actually know how to use it or have any real need for it. They're like the trophy hunters in the jungle of Adobe, Microsoft, Corel and friends. "D00d I scored pshop cs last night, r0xx0rz!! how do i put my sisters head on britneys bodey?". They don't seem to care about getting 0wn3d, and thing they're enlarging their l33t sysadmin skillz when they end up reinstalling.
The reality is, I'm too busy to have to do battle with my PC when all I really want to do is get my work done then kick back with a beer and chill. Linux makes this a possibility for me in a way proprietary software can't.
Ready for the desktop? Of course it fscking is! (Hey, my wife uses it on her PC, and she's totally non-techie)
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/