Britney is #1 Virus Celebrity

No France writes "The two ways for an email virus to spread is to use an exploit, or entice the user to click the link/executable. Of course the latter is the easiest, and is the most effective when used in conjunction with a celebrity's name. Despite the recent Jackson suicide emails, Britney Spears is the one to recently edge out Bill Gates as the top virus celebrity. The top 10 (in descending order): Britney Spears, Bill Gates, Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Osama Bin Laden, Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Anna Kournikova, Paris Hilton, and Pamela Anderson."

Comments

Virus Drills

[bigtallmofo]

I've said this many times before, but my idea is to stage virus drills. Every week or so, the IT department should send fake viruses to a random population of the corporate environment. It will have an attachment that will only report to the IT department who opened it. Once a user opens the fake virus attachment, they must watch a 2-hour video on their own time on the subject of "safe email habits".

Pretty soon, they'll be too paranoid to open any attachment.

Re:You almost have to love virus writers...

[m50d]

Yes, they did. Back in "the day" viruses were often written in hand-coded assembly. That was craftsmanship, that was /misty eyes. Seriously, visual basic is used mainly for two reasons. Firstly, most virus writers are fairly immature (except those trying to get botnets for money) and visual basic is often the first language they learn. Secondly, visual basic scripts include their source, thus if you want to base your virus on an existing one, it's a lot easier to do with a visual basic one than decompiling a virus and trying to make sense of it. Any other dynamic language would work for this, but windows ships with visual basic interpreter wheras it doesn't include one for perl, python etc. (and dos scripting is too useless)