Computer Viruses Broke 100,000 In 2004

Sammy at Palm Addict writes "The count of known computer viruses broke the 100,000 barrier in 2004 and the number of new viruses grew by more than 50% according to news from the BBC. The BBC also reports that 'phishing attempts, in which conmen try to trick people into handing over confidential data, are recording growth rates of more than 30% with attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated.'"

Comments

complacency

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you have an ultra-secure computer doesn't mean you should be complacent about theft of confidential data.

One of my buddies got his credit identity stolen a few months ago, he figures, by someone at a store who processed his credit application when he bought a home theatre system (Zero interest! Don't pay til way later!).

By the time collection agencies were knocking at his door, that store had closed.

what viruses? where?

[gobbo]

I've gotten so cozy in my nearly MS-free world since I managed to offload the last W2K machine that I forget about the risks, and how that antiviral cruft soaked up CPU and RAM.

Until, that is, I open an MS Office document with macros, then the whole sense of dread and ire comes back; and I'm always surprised and annoyed when the latest worm brings local networks staggering to their knees.

I don't really care about viruses...

[Kjella]

100, 100.000 or more... viruses are quite easy to contain because they are unquestionably nuked as such. What I don't like is all the other semi-legitimate software (hello adware, hello malware, hello spyware) which can fuck up your computer almost as bad or worse, except they come with an EULA.

I think all software should come with a self-signed key. By default it should allow upgrades by the same key (version 1.0->version 1.1), but not let other programs update eachother (e.g. explorer hooks, IE hooks, grab default applications, overwrite system libraries etc.)

I'm talking about all optional here, not DRM. I would love to have it such that I could install apache on my linux box, and not have it overwritten by anyone but apache (without my explicit permission) as well. Right now, once you have root, it is enough. But proper rights should be "need-to-have". Give a program permission to install itself, but don't fuck the rest of the system? Today, that can't be done.

Kjella

Re:Could we have a distinction here?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

And what's the market share of Windows these days?

Try to compare apples to apples...

Divide the # of viruses by the user base of the affected platform, see who is ahead at that point. I have no idea, my guess is it's probably fairly even, probably just a little slanted in favor of Linux.

Last I heard, there were something like 100 known Linux viruses, and 20 known Mac OS X viruses. Assume the current desktop market share is 3-5% each for Linux and Mac, and Windows still comes out "ahead" by quite a large margin. On the server side, of course, things look even worse for Windows.