January 2006 Virus and Spam Statistics

Ant writes "Commtouch reports the January 2006's virus and spam statistics. Its summary said there were four massive virus attacks (including a multi-wave attack of 7 variants) and the most aggressive attacks penetrated before the average antivirus (AV) solution could even release a signature. The data is based on information continuously gathered by the Commtouch Detection Center, which analyzed more than 2 billion messages from over 130 countries during the month of January 2006..."

Comments

Problematic Signature Release Issue

[wormnet.org]

Not very long ago, when the Kama Sutra (Nyxem.E, MyWife, whatever) worm was released to the world it seemed to take absolutely forever to find anyone with a solution for the removal or even the detection of the thing. I think it was almost a full week before the signatures were widely distributed. Even though this was a attack was very mild (as far as viruses are concerned), what would have been the outcome had this been "the Big One"?

Re:Problematic Signature Release Issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is never going to compile dude. MyWife is supposed to be the first argument of KamaSutra().

Tell me about it.

[MutantHamster]

January was a horrible month for viruses. Take it from me: If you get an email from an Asian Bird, don't open it.

What are the long term trends of spam?

[antifoidulus]

That is some interesting research(only 5% of spam is porn?!), but where is spam headed long term? They have that little graph were you can see trends for 30 days, 100 days, or 12 months(though the 30 days and 12 months didn't work for me in Safari), but does anyone have reliable statistics that go back farther?

Is spam burning out, finding new markets, or are people just continuing to send spam even if they don't make a profit on it?

Re:What are the long term trends of spam?

[mctk]

Actually, I do have research that goes back further. Please, post a reply that contains your email address and I'll be sure and send you my spam-research-installer. After clicking "yes" to all of the options, you'll be granted access to a huge database containing thousands of research papers 6arranteed t o maek ur Pennis HU6E!!!!!1!!!111!

ahem, sorry.

Rapid immune response

[Mostly a lurker]

It does seem that some virus attacks are occurring too quickly for traditional AV approaches to provide adequate protection. Perhaps an approach suggested by Israeli researchers, Distributive immunization of networks against viruses using the 'honey-pot' architecture [warning: PDF], has virtue. The basic idea is to automate virus recognition and immediately push a "vaccine" to potentially vulnerable machines.

Spam is here to stay

[Opportunist]

First of all, spamfilters, no matter how good they are, won't solve it. Who has filters? You, me, the rest of the "clued" people. But we wouldn't click on a spam ad anyway, would we?

The people who do click on one simply have no clue what's going on and thus have no spamfilter. So spamfilters are simply for our convenience of not having to deal with junk.

Laws won't make spam go away. Unless you have a globally universal and most of all equal law concerning spam, all it does is to go to another place. And since making spam legal equals tax income for a country, I'd give a the possibility of the RIAA realizing that copycrippling their music isn't the right way a higher chance of coming to reality.

So Spam is here, and it's here to stay. It will maybe become more sophisticated, and it will most certainly become used by people wanting to plant other malware onto your system (e.g. the combination of spamming a link and planting a bogus WMF onto the referred site).

But Spam won't stop.

This proves antivirus is useless

[J0nne]

If this report proves anything, is that running antivirus software is not good protection. You have to educate users not to open suspicious attachments, not to run IE, and to keep their systems updated (every modern OS does this automatically! Windows also does this since SP2). A firewall and/or NAT router is always a good idea too.

I don't run antivirus (except the occasional ClamWin run if I downloaded something I don't trust completely), and I manage to keep my computer clean just by following the above rules. Antivirus won't protect you from ad/spyware anyway, and these things have become worse than viruses.

If the antivirus vendors can't keep up with new viruses, you might aswell stop paying for antivirus. After all, it won't protect you.

Nice graphics?

[RT Alec]

Pretty graphics, lots of "ooooo" factor. I find that they tell me nothing. This is a trend in the "network security" field:

1. find a subject for which a lot of data can be collected
2. preparing a bunch of colorful charts and graph that don't actualy convey any meaningful information
3. Profit (or at least get mentioned on Slashdot, et al.)

Tufte would be ashamed.

The Slashdot story is a press release only.

[Futurepower(R)]

I wish that Slashdot editors would not post stories about press releases! Did someone get paid under the table?

It's very common that press releases contain entirely invented "information". Certainly the people who write them can be expected to have NO technical knowledge, and not to care that they have no technical knowledge.

--
If they enjoy it or it makes them money, rich people and leaders can kill small animals and Iraqis?

I'm sick of all of these scares.

[kadathseeker]

I wish, after all of this hyping, that we'd get a bug as well written as some of these (you know, that gets into everything and around all defenses) but gets old-school on its victims. None of this pussyfooting around, I mean like copy itself, mailing itself to all of your contacts, and delete everyone's hard drives. Or filling it with beastiality pron. Nasty stuff.

Show these kids what a real virus is about. Put that hype to good use. And make everyone stop acting like EVERY LITTLE BUG IS A RIDER OF THE APOCALYPSE. Because most of these, like even the Sober worm, aren't really that harmful. Most malware writers are really only out for money, not general misanthropia. I just want ONE killer bug to put all of this in perspective. And maybe get people to switch to a modern OS like Linus, BSD, or OS X.

Because no, not even Norton can save you.