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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.
(Seriously, this information may or may not be true...but can we say "vested interest?")
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Porting is always appreciated!
Never learn by your mistakes, if you do you may never dare to try again
Does that mean that there will be some? Ooh! Can't wait for McAfee for my box!
End the FUD
Water is wet.
If that headline were "Fords suddenly accelerating into oncoming traffic more in 2004", we'd see a lot more action than just applause at Gates' empty lies about prioritizing security.
--
make install -not war
Related article on NewScientist says "[t]housands of zombie PCs created daily" Also if you want this story de-uglied click here
Trolling is a art,
Well, that generally is the cold and flu season :P
I dont think we will see a real change in the viruses for Linux until their market share increases to appeal to the spammers and virus writers...
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
This is just what you expect when using a modern operating system. The level of viruses in the windows world is to be solely blamed on the users for their lack of responsibility, not in any way to be blamed on Microsoft for in some way creating an environment conducive to these things. Things like running an NAT to prevent possibly malicious inbound connections, having to patch frequently and early in case of exposed security vulnerabilities, and treating every file-- even a passive file like an email-- with suspicion are just an inherent part of using a consumer operating system, and something you should have to expect to do in order to run a simple computer which reads email and searches the web and prints microsoft word documents. The fact that no other operating system in the world has problems any way comparable to the worm and virus problem experienced by users of Microsoft operating systems is due to factors other than the actions of Microsoft.
2 + 2 = 5
If you install it, they will come.
"Also mentions the likelihood that viruses for Linux and handhelds will see a sharp rise"
The media have this amazing power to decide that something is true simply by saying so. Lucky bastards.
Is it me, or does slashdot report the news that "Windows viruses on the rise!" or some derivation thereof every single fucking day?
I mean, this is just a mainstream news spacefiller about stuff we know all about.
Forget your it and politics sections. Just make a "ms-flamebait" section, and just repost this "announcement" that there are lots of Windows' malware every 15 minutes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Is there a smarter person than me who can tell me how likely it is that there will be worms that can distribute themselves via thunderbird, evolution and the likes that bother the end-user directly?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
...up by 300% that would be... ...hmmm, what's 300% of 0?
(This IS just a joke. I'm not sure if there's a Linux virus or not, but I'm not aware of any. Please don't take this e-mail as a recommendation to not patch your Linux boxen regularly or to not take security seriously in Linux.)
This short article mentions an increase in linux viruses, but fails to mention the obvious fact about a virus that attacks any open source operating system: Any exploit that is found by someone malicious will be quickly fixed by the overwhelming majority that belongs to the benevolent OSS community. The lifetime of a virus attacking and open source OS would be very short, and wouldn't require the use of any third party virus protection software to fix.
From the article:
Spammers, after forking over money to the hackers for access, then flood those hacked computers with unsolicited messages, or spam, that often advertise products or get people to spend money.
That makes it sound like they take over your machine so they can send you spam. No, they take over your machine so that they can USE your machine to send spam to millions of other users.
Using Linux is boring - nothing ever goes wrong.
Virus
Spyware
Adware
Blue Screen
What's amazing is that in windows land you can have all 4 seasons all year round.
Eventually what will end up happening from all of the virii and worms being released, as well as the explosion of spam and unsolicited messages will be that people are just going to get fed up and stop using computers as well as the internet as much as previously. The standard home users will abandon the internet, and the .com boom will shrivel more and more until computers will be reserved for direct communication and business purposes. People can only stand so much of the garbage associated with running computers.
...that the recession is not hurting virus writers!
I thought last year was supposed to be the 'worst ever' according to this article anyway.
Hmmm, let's review:
2003 - worst year ever
2004 - viruses sharply up (from the worst year ever)
So - when does that 'Great Security Initiative' of 2002 start working? Microsoft please - the authenticated code approach doesn't work. Sandboxes do.
Yes.
That's just the first of 3237 search results for "Linux" at SARC.
In market news, Virus Inc reported stronger-than-expected results, beating street analysis by a broad margin, sending Microsoft lower. Symantec, a promary contractor of Virus Inc, said that they are pleased with the performance "When they do well, we do well" said Ama Popup, director of Marketing at Symatec. Sasser, spokesman for Virus Inc, relayed the management outlook by saying "We expect to migrate our primary products to Linux as soon as it is popular enough to warrant the cost." Asked whether their plans were too optimistic, Sasser replied: "We are fighting against open source hackers who attempt to build security on consumer-grade products. We are confident that the average user will help us defeat such paranoid and counter-productive efforts."
"Piter, too, is dead."
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?
Because you know it would happen.
Symantec also said it expects more viruses and worms in the future to be written to attack systems that run on the Linux operating system and hand-held devices as they become more widely used.
Hmmm, Symantec sells virus protection for hand-helds and Linux. I sure hope that they believe there will be more virus/spam attacks against these systems.
Some people have a way with words, others not have way.
Seriously, is linux actually more secure? Will desktop vendors make it less secure for Joe Sixpack by stuff like root by default? Why aren't people writing linux viruses?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Quoth the article:
Symantec also said it expects more viruses and worms in the future to be written to attack systems that run on the Linux operating system and hand-held devices as they become more widely used.
Hand held devices are already pretty widely used. Also, do they mean Pocket Windows? Palm OS? And have they checked the numbers?
My problem is that there is no great proof that I've seen for or against linux/Mac/Palm OS being more secure or less prone to viruses. A sentence beginning with Symmantec always makes me think this is just FUD to stir up concern on other platforms to purchase products, with no basis in fact.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
just kidding, albeit this would be nice to see. it may put to rest some assumptions that the relative popularity for windows is the pre-emptive reason there are so many viruses for the platform. perhaps Symantec would be the glad sponsor - somehow i doubt it ;)
Over the weekend, a young guide in a Buddhist museum (in the US) stopped me from snapping some pics of some new reproductions of some paintings. I put away the camera immediately, but he grew angry when I calmly asked "why?", snarling about "security", and "thieves casing 15th Century art". When I asked him if those paintings were that old, he growled that they were only a year old, but his body language projected rage and implied violence, mounting as he started to hear his own inadequate responses. When I asked him why he was glaring at me, he told me that I was making him angry, that I should just accept what I'm told without asking so many questions. Not only doesn't this guy understand security, he doesn't understand Buddhism. And of course he's part of an entire generation of petty fascists, enforcing the nonsensical security policies that give them a little power, channeling their rage at the contradictions they enforce onto the people who they service.
--
make install -not war
I submitted the NYT story, and the BBC story, that i now seem to have lost the link to... at 2 in the morning :) and it sees to have turned into the 5:35 am story..
But it IS remarkably more humorous because M$ has posted the reuters story.
Whats also interesting is just how bad norton and mcaffe, or rather the consumer versions ive seen lately, tend to be at protecting machines. The ONLY reason i still like symantec is the fact that do and publish research.
I couldent find a link to the actual "threat assesment report" er, the current one anyway, on the symatec website. If anyone has it, please post that sucker.
Thank goodness I'm smart enough to avoid th...ooh, free Britney Spears pr0n!
Hmmm... I seriously doubt that there is going to be a "sharp rise" in Linux viruses for a few reasons:
1. Most people, when it comes to doing work, try to do just enough to get by. If it's easier to infect a machine running Windows than it is to do one running Linux, it'll be the Windows machine getting attacked.
2. In the same vein, most people you use Linux or a different flavor of *nix tend to be more technically savvy than the typical Windows user and secure their systems properly (in my experience). Note, I am talking about users here, not computer professionals.
3. And the numbers of Linux systems available for compromise still isn't as high as the number of new computers that boot into Windows when they come out of the box from Dell (IBM, HP, Compaq, etc).
Will we eventually see more Linux systems being attacked? Sure, as people finally get a clue and either secure their Windows systems properly, install a decent firewall (preferably hardware), change OSes, or get get disgusted with the Internet in general and pull the plug.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Yes, the number of viruses will rise as the use of these operating systems rises. However, I don't think they'll have anywhere near as much of an impact on each respective machine.. you know.. stricter permissions and all. If Windows would implement something akin to the *nix 'root' user, it would go a long way in helping with security.
What is your penile percentile?
Linux on the other hand generally will not let information flow freely between different apps and the OS, you have to tell it to do something like that, its (infinitely) more transparent.
So while we will see linux virii, they might only work on mandrake 8.2 and red hat 83.42.19, and only if you have the right library installed in the right place and were logged in as root to read your email.
00010111 always try everything twice
I, and perhaps many others, would be very happy if everyone would just do the following:
:)
1) DON'T BUY SPAMVERTISED PRODUCTS.
2) STOP USING IE. There are lots of great alternatives.
3) Use a decent ingress/egress firewall.
4) Keep AV software updated. And, keep it running!
5) Don't run with admin priviledges. I know this is impossible for most Windows users.
6) Don't call me when you screw up your computer and expect me to fix it as a favor!
P.S. I shouldn't bitch so much. I've made a decent amount of money removing malware during the last six months.
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.
VIRUSES - A big problem on Windows, currently not a big problem on Linux. I view viruses as a failure of the security model of the operating system.
...
... So the "solution" is to block or slow the most common method of such "infections". Which is Microsoft Outlook and its ability to run executable attachments. Just NOT enabling this functionality on Linux email clients would prevent most trojan attacks from "infecting" the computer.
Windows is still VERY open to viruses but for pure infection rates they can't match
TROJANS - particularly the email types. Dumb user clicks on an attachment and gets infected. The trojan then emails itself to everyone in his address book (on the assumption that dumb people have dumb friends). Trojans will be with us as long as we have dumb users.
-and-
WORMS - The spread without any human intervention. But these should have a very short life span. Patch the flaw and they die.
Which shows why Linux has been so resistant to "viruses" so far.
#1. Worms - Not everyone runs the same services, active, with the same flaws, unprotected by a firewall. And there is no reason to believe that this will ever change. Worms are a minor threat on Linux.
#2. Viruses - the security model for Linux is better at preventing infections than Microsoft's model. Unless this changes (again, why would it), viruses will remain a minor threat on Linux.
#3. Rootkits - a problem, but they rely upon flaws the same a worms do.
#4. Trojans - We'll see. Unfortunately, as I stated above, this is also the largest current "virus" threat today. If you can get a dumb user to go through all the steps necessary to install it
So, while Linux is not perfect, it is far more resistant to viruses, worms and even dumb user trojans than Windows is.
If you check www.norton.com, there hasn't been in a virus or worm in 2003 and 2004. If you want to check the high impact advisories in 2004: A almost all of them belong to Windows and one belongs to Linux (January 5, 2004). If you look at the current activity of CERT http://www.us-cert.gov/current/current_activity.ht ml
All of them belong to Windows. Go back to the archives for 2004, almost all of them belong to Windows except for May 5, 2004 (Cisco security problem)
There are a lot of reasons why viruses and worms will never be such a huge problem in Linux as they are in Windows now:
Will we see Linux desktop viruses? Almost certainly yes. But they will be pretty rare and not an epidemy like those on Windows today.
What part of this surprises anyone?
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
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/
As Evolution, Kontact (KDE's groupware suite, encorporating Kmail) and Thunderbird vie for desktop supremacy new features will be developed, and copied, and theoretically you will start seeing the same technologies popping up in at least the top three dominant mail clients (and web browsers) on the Linux platform. Once you get common technologies, that's when virus writers have something to target that they know will be common across their userbase (or at least a large part of it). That's the situation that has led to so many exploits for Windows software, and the potential is that exploits for Linux software could be developed and could spread.
However, because of the security model of Linux (ie. each user only has write access to his own files) the furthest any worm or virus will be able to spread is to that user's files and directories. So, wipe the user and restore from backup, and your virus woes are dealt with.
As long as the security model for Linux remains unchanged, this will be the case, and viruses and worms, while probably becoming more frequent, will never be able to do significant damage to a machine.
THIS is why Linux is less susceptible to viruses. The arguement that it's a more obscure platform only holds water up to a point.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
It is Highly unlikely a seperate section
for MS-FLAMEBAIT --
As we know Articles realated to Microsoft have
a minimum comment range of 400-500 while max could be anything from 1000-2000 range.
In stark comparison most other articles would only get a minimum of 60 or a max of 350 [ 60-350 Range].
If M$ related stories are moved to a seperate section then the number of comments in main section will drastically reduce!
Which could signal slashdotters that less and less people are visiting slashdot - Slashdot image gets a hit!
And neither will the MS-FLAMEBAIT section get all the hits or comments.
Not many would be inclined enough to GO to M$-F section and bash M$.They do it on M$ stories on Main page coz it infuriates them!
Why does yahoo do this
There have been several Linux worms as well, like the Lion worm. BTW: very interesting story about the origins of that one! Some even stay only in memory after infection, so that you can remove them by a simple reboot (and get re-infected 2 minutes later). Not changing any system files makes them harder to detect.
Usually these don't have as big an impact as their Windows counterparts, I suspect this has a lot to do with the way the average *nix system is managed in comparison to the average Windoze box. Decent built-in security, and software distributed in source form, makes life a lot harder for worms, spyware and shit like that.
It doesn't really matter if it's a browser-only or other type of exploit. Malware like worms, virusses, spyware, whatever, eat CPU time, memory, can cause unexpected crashes, leak private information, loads of network traffic, or weird/annoying behaviour of your system. In short: they cost you (time and/or money). And what they do (infect other systems, send spam, ...), causes cost on others as well.
There are far more Linux machines connected with more bandwidth today than there were net-connected Windows machines when viruses started becoming a problem for those users.
Linux is heavily used by Wall Street and major banks, many websites handling ecommerce, and many sites with fast links. If I was a virus writer, I would aim for the first two if I was after money, and the latter if I wanted zombies for denial-of-service attacks. And if my goal was demonstrating my technical virtuosity, I would go after Linux (and OpenBSD, and Solaris, and Mac) systems rather than Aunt Tildy's Win98 box.
No, the reason there are few Linux exploits is because a properly configured Linux machine is a lot harder to attack, and the different distros make for enough variations that a virus will have a hard time cross-infecting enough of the variants. Linux upgrades are pesky, but frequent and free. If Linspire Linux (log in as root? feh!) ever becomes popular with the newbies, then there will be plenty of exploits - for a while. Then the not-so-newbie users will migrate to more secure but equally easy to use Linux distros (like Xandros), and Linux will regain its well-deserved reputation for security.
Any OS can be made more insecure by carelessness. There are probably hundreds of zombied Linux boxen out there right now. But only proprietary software forbids exceeding the security the manufacturer provides for you. Microsoft and Symantec have some great programmers working on security, but they are few, and limited by corporate monoculture attitudes. It is the search for security excellence among the far more numerous developers and savvy users of Linux that make it grow more secure daily, and it is the democratization and openness of the process that makes good security practices spread among more ordinary users.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
More like the OS is as secure as the admin maintaining it.
I think it's a dangerous attitude to believe that you're secure just because you run Linux. 50 unpatched exploits on a Windows box vs 1 unpatched exploit on a Linux box - you're owned either way. Unless you're keeping a close eye on things, your *nix box could get owned and you wouldn't even think to notice.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
There are a few Linux viruses out there...
a few worms
So, why don't you stop spreading FUD?
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Have a look at the nature of the vulnerabilities, including those beyond IIS6 and Apache2. Typically, an Apache crack will get you limited access as user nobody or apache, but an IIS crack will get you carte blanche on the machine.
Would you rather break into a bank that had layer upon layer of security including internal hardwall partitioning, or one that only had thick external walls and a few alarms on those? Maybe ripping off the day's float would be not much different between banks, but what if getting into the vault is not significantly harder than getting the float at one bank?
It's not the admins (or at least, the difference in admin quality is not overwhelming enough to explain the differences in cracks). Roughly 80% of all email is transported by FOSS mailers, and yet where do practically all MTA attacks land? Shall we compare the difference in hardening between, say, PostFix or QMail and MS-Exchange?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
No, you can't. You can get small patch collections separately, but you can't get down to the level of an individual patch, and nor can you (reasonably) alter those patches at all.
With Linux, you always have the choice of downloading the patch proper and rebuilding the thing yourself (typically rpm -bb package). Then if it causes you problems, you can delete or modify one element of a patch collection to make it happy again for you. You can also inspect the patch to see exactly what it does, rather than what the vendor says it does.
That's the GPP's point: Microsoft don't do the proactive thing nearly as well as the major FOSS packages. Part of this is that the MS code is not open to wide inspection, part of it is because Marketing rules the roost at Microsoft, and part of it is that William Henry "Trey" Gates III holds dear to his heart the principle of releasing new features in preference to fixing bugs - which attitude his company will eventually, inevitably propagate.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
We started filtering viruses from our incoming mail in November, and as the sysadmin for the mail server in question, I was nervously awaiting the first onslaught of viruses. The statistics for the first couple months were dismal, with the number of viruses canned being at only about 2-300 a day, and sometimes a lot less.
Then MyDoom came out January 28, 2004. This day will live on in infamy since I posted to usenet about it and it's in Google's cache.
We went from 300 a day to 15,000 a day in two days.
After a while though, it died down. To about 5000 a day, still more than 10 times what it used to be. Then Zafi came out on June 11th and in three days the number of virus hits hit their peak at about 110K per day.
Again, it died down, but now we're cleaning *coughcough*only*cough* 15,000 messages per day out of our mail. Yes, that's right, we're now filtering more viruses on a daily basis than at the *peak* of MyDoom.
If the people at F-Prot, or the developers of qmail-scanner are listening, thank you. You've saved a lot of people a lot of pain.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert