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Future Trends of Malware
An anonymous reader writes "What are the driving forces behind the rise of malware? Who's behind it, and what tactics do they use? How are vendors responding, and what should organizations, researchers, and end users keep in mind for the upcoming future? All these questions and more are answered in the well written (MHO) Future Trends of Malware"
Funny you mention that, because once they're infected, the spam barrage usually comes next. At our company, (an ISP) it takes less than a day to see the complaints from these people. They're then notified that *something* is wrong, and they need to look at it. If it isn't fixed, we usually call them then. If they continue to ignore the problem, they're disconnected until we can look at the computer. At that point, it's a willful TOS violation for spamming, even if they aren't the real spammer since the messages are coming from their machine.
note: I can too make fun of all antivirus companies. I run debian.
I haven't installed an anti-virus software on my home PC and laptop for over 3 years now (both running Windows). Never had any problems either. I just follow a few paranoid steps:
- Firewall the machines router + laptop has software firewall.
- Avoid IE like the plague.
- Avoid Outlook Express like the plague.
- Try as much as possible using a limited rights account instead of root. For some games and apps it doesn't work but for most mundane tasks like browsing, video, mp3 playback it works great.
- VMware or VirtualPC is your friend if you want to run code from ugh *cough* warez sites *cough*, but as a general step, I refuse to open any email attachment that isn't an image, video or hyperlink from a trusted source (ie: someone emailing a funny image to group of friends). I treat every email attachement that I receive on my home PC as a virus. I then lower the severity of it based on file type.
- Firefox + Adblock = golden.
Is it perfect? Nope but paranoid surfing habits as in don't click on "OMG YOUR PC IS SLOW SPEED IT UP" flashing crap helps, or when you get to a pr0n site and it offers you a plugin.exe it might also be a bad idea to execute it.