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US Leads the World In Malware Creation
PetManimal writes "Symantec says that China, Russia, and the other developing countries usually blamed for the increasing amount of malware are not the biggest culprits. The security software company released a report (PDF) claiming that the US leads the world in a number of malware categories, ranging from the 'amount of malicious activity originating from their networks' to 'underground economy servers.' Preston Gralla says the US lead should come as no surprise, considering the capitalist way of life and the high level of technical knowledge. He also suggests that the some of the 'criminals' may actually be Internet entrepreneurs who crossed over to the dark side: 'It's an inevitable result of a thriving free market and tech expertise. An underground economy often mirrors the legal, above-ground one. Scratch a criminal, and sometimes you find a misguided entrepreneur, looking to get rich a little too quick.'"
Idle hands are the devil's plaything. I would think the America's constant need to be entertained also factors into the amount of malware.
Demented But Determined.
During the depths of the IT recession, there were rumbles of out-of-work programmers talking about joining the "dark side" out of frustration. Perhaps many did.
Table-ized A.I.
#1
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
There are a number of fairly organized malware purveyors from Canada as well, I think what separates the malware originating from North America, and the malware coming from the East is the purpose of the malware.
In NA, its mainly spyware or extortionware.
From the East a majority of them are keyloggers, dialers.
How can you be sure who makes the most malware. People arent exactly admitting to it.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Takes one to know one. Symantec's software has all the qualities you'd ever want in a well crafted piece of malware.
Scratch a criminal, and sometimes you find a misguided entrepreneur, looking to get rich a little too quick.
Is malware even illegal? How is malware different from say, an automatic update or some other less than desirable software? Just because something is annoying doesn't necessarily mean it's illegal and that the author is a criminal.
Agreed , not all 'malware' is out to get you, there is a fine line though between
adware and 'malware' at times.
a good software engineer, that is a 'real engineer' would refuse to create such a product, as they are sworn to protect the public interest at all costs.
A programmer mind you, unless they are ethical, goes where the money is.
Lets call the industry what it is, and the workers what they are. Engineers != programmers.
Engineers can be held accountable, in many ways. Programmers on the other hand, can always hide behind the shield of the corporation.
I figured it was because of a certain Redmond company, personally... :)
The only question then being whether or not Windows was counted *as* malware...
You are free to leave, anytime. Malware targets the US largely because we happen to have the most 'disposable' income-- Suck it commie!
But don't forget high speed pizza delivery too!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
We, like, own the internet don't we? Al Gore invented it after all, and all of the important servers and tubes is on our half of the planet!
Because of all of this, we should have every right to exclusively fuck it up.
for sale
I'm a self-modifying sig virus
That said . . . in your face, China, Russia and the other developing countries - in your face!
Oh, and a slight aside to the /. eds - I suspect that both the Chinese and the Russian people would be *ahem* amused at having their respective countries referred to as "developing countries". Just sayin'
I would guess that those numbers correspond to the number of users combined with the number of users who have no idea what computer security means.
How many people buy a computer without knowing how to use one safely? How many of those people buy a computer and run around on the internet as administrator?
Anytime you have a large number of users who do not understand or care to secure their computers, you will have higher numbers of those users who have been owned.
Today's show is brought to you by the number 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0: 25
We all know that Microsoft makes the most common malware known to computing. There was never really any competition to stop the USA getting the title.
:(){
So shut up or leave are the only options? One isn't alowed to criticise what one sees as a problem in a country one loves, perhaps in hope it will get rectified once enough people point it out? I find your attitude rather similar to that of many hard-line communists. Besides, we are talking about malware created in the US, not targeted to the US.
AccountKiller
Since when is criticism equal to hate?
AccountKiller
And malware will go away for good!
:(
Fat chance of that happening at all, huh?
Sometime when you're looking for an evening's entertainment (and not in the company of others, unless they also find this sort of thing terribly interesting), fire up a VMWare VM and load it up with Windows XP SP1, then fire up Internet Explorer and browse around. For fastest results, be sure to hit up some of the seedier side of the internet -- a quick Google for "serial numbers" will get you malware-ridden sites within the first few results. Then, just hit yourself on the head or otherwise simulate a stupid/ignorant user, and click "OK" to anything the computer prompts at you for a few minutes.
In short order, you will probably have so much adware, malware, Trojans, and keyloggers on the VM, it's nearly impossible to ever clean it out (AFAIK you really can't with any reliability say that a machine once rooted is 'clean' until you zero the drive and reinstall from media). Monitoring the network connections and traffic that the VM makes is also pretty interesting. (Its easiest if you set up the VM's virtual interface with a different IP than the host machine's physical interface.)
If you want to go for a second round, Google "adware removal" and download or run the first half-dozen or so tools that you see; chances are at least some of them will make the problem worse.
The benefit of doing this in a VM is you can trivially roll the system back to an uncorrupted state, and just banish the thing altogether when you're done entertaining yourself. It really caused me to appreciate two things: one, reminding me why I don't use that OS at home, and two, the absolutely ridiculous amount of effort that must be spent (patching, updating, firewalling, antivirusing, user training) to keep the billions of Windows machines that people depend on from succumbing to the same fate in a matter of minutes.
Anyone who doesn't use Windows on a regular basis should do that every year or so, if only for the "there, but for the grace of God..." value.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Heh. While I find your comment amusing I must point out it's not the /.er's fault that China and Russia are considered developing countries. Blame human geographers for that. Russia and China are considered Developing by those groups. Personally I think it's just silly, who are we (people in general, not the US) to determine what style of life is better than another, but hey, that's how it is.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
Looks like Symantec just found out about MySpace.
They might say better to be developing than going backwards...
Writin' the malware to save the muther f*ckin day yea!
Malware!
Spyware!
Adware!
F*CK YEA!
At least we still lead the world in something! Take that, Indian outsourcing companies.
FACT: These are OWNED servers, and are used as delivery vehicles for malware created outside the US. This is was it not being considered, but it is there and not too hard to discern. Also, you must consider that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can rent a colo server in .com land. You think the Chinese are not? You kid yourself then. rackspace will take anyone. serverbeach, anyone. And when I mean anyone, I mean anyone.
Well yeah, that's because Redmond is located within the US.
*ducks*
"A good compromise leaves everyone mad." -Calvin
symantec has always come with the qualities that serves the one-piece well implemented malware...are we talkin that malware is such a illegal? i wonder how it works for that purpose?
Where does it become a critical problem. Well, if you get a system that is infected, you may start having problems with not only your system, but with your enterprise network. In many cases, as you might expect. The end result is that the software tries to spread itself to other and begins to use all of the bandwidth you have on your enterprise for that purpose. If you have unprotected 'everyone' shares, the software can even propagate itself to others on your network, much like a virus or Trojan and then they start transmitting too. In the worse case scenario, you may receive communication from your ISP indicating that an address within your enterprise has a problem and unless you solve it, they will discontinue services. AT&T, Qwest, the RBOC (Regional Bell Operating Companies) and others follow this practice now.
USA! USA! USA!
I don't therefore I'm not.
"Scratch a criminal, and sometimes you find a misguided entrepreneur, looking to get rich a little too quick.'"
You could say the same thing about crack dealers or contract killers, am I supposed to be sympathetic to them too?
I'm not bothered by the legal aspects as much as the ethical ones. If someone is hurting someone else, they're doing something wrong. End of story.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
We're #1! We're #1! The US is #1! WOOOO!
And there ain't no doubt I love this land. God bless the USAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!</lee-greenwood>
... and operating systems, and encryption, and VoIP, and browsers, and tax preparation, and CRM, and video games, and instant message clients, and illustration/graphic design, and pretty much any other string which you can append "software" to. That we lead in malware is not a heck of a lot of suprise. We also probably are neck and neck with Japan for producing cars used by bank robbers in getaways.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I worked with a guy, when we were working on malware removal techniques, who did exactly this. Our google search was either 'warez' or 'crackz', I can't recall. He even played the stupid user - "Yeah, I'm sure I can install this activeX stuff, whatever that means...The site told me to hit OK" - and the box was LEVELED beyond repair in under 5 minutes and 10 sites. We had to pull the virtual ethernet card on it. It got to the point that the box almost got beligerent as we tried to pull the malware out... This stuff isn't your typical virus from 10 years ago! I forget how many hits we picked up from adaware and spybot, but it was in the several hundreds. Oh, and it was a SP2 box, as well.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Criticism is equal to hate when your IQ is below 60. Or if you're a member of the Bush administration.
Sorry for the repetition.
He also suggests that the some of the 'criminals' may actually be Internet entrepreneurs who crossed over to the dark side
And they're different from the kind that run companies to the ground, create loopholes to avoid domestic workers, and fake their deaths to void convictions? Somehow the differences aren't stacking up.
It's an inevitable result of a thriving free market and tech expertise.
Apparently the Midwest hasn't gotten the memo on that one, since the 2001 recession is still going, continued by 2003's wave of job theft. There are some things that Ivy League economists will never understand. Thriving and "free market" somehow just aren't mixing in places that get the idea of not treating businesses like $DEITY.
An underground economy often mirrors the legal, above-ground one. Scratch a criminal, and sometimes you find a misguided entrepreneur, looking to get rich a little too quick.'
Wasnt that covered in Enron, Worldcom, HP (Hurd and Fiorina), and about any organization that uses loopholes to offshore work? That seems to point to a "misguided entrepreneur" as being one that has some morals left in them, not someone who's gone criminal.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
This is my apprentice, Darth Malware. He will find your lost revenue.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
Scratch an entrepreneur who is willing to ignore good business practices and ethics to get rich quickly, and you'll most likely find a criminal.
The argument is that the US' high degree of malware creation comes down to the US capitalist/free market life of way, that people create these to seek riches that are denied them.
The implicit claim is that if computer literacy and absorption and internet access was equally prevalent in any other ('less capitalist') part of the world, i.e. you control for that, then they would still be behind the US in terms of malware creation.
This is a Marxist argument, that the desire for significant material comfort is a byproduct of a capitalist upbringing, and if people have a correct/naturalised upbringing this desire will cease. It is also in my view wrong.
Windows should probably have been excluded, although doing so might drop the US far down the list.
The ol red white and blue aint dead yet! Suck on that, Indier!
U-S-A! Num-ber-1!
U-S-A! Num-ber-1!
U-S-A! Num-ber-1!
Keep the whitehouse white, vote Trump & Palin 2020.
I would say quite often in fact, but that's just my opinion. I think there is something in what serves as the basic moral code in American-style business, that makes it difficult to know where the line goes. Now don't take this as an attack on Americans or even America in general, but the kind of business ethics that is tought to American MBAs etc, is scarily devoid of what normal people would consider good moral.
I once read about a class situation at one university - I don't recall the exact circumstances, but perhaps somebody else recognises it. The professor asked the class 'You are in charge of marketing a new medicine, and you receive reports that this medicine may be dangerous. What is the right thing to do?' Most would say things like 'We have to hold back and find out whether this product is actually dangerous and perhaps stop selling it' - but the 'right' answer, according to the professor was 'You keep on selling as much as possible until the company is forced to stop. Your only concern should be the shareholders' profit'
This story, I think, tells just how twisted things can be. When young people are told that they have to commit moral and ethical suicide like this, how should they be able to see the fine line between being a creative entrpreneur and an outright criminal? If the size of the profit is what determines how 'right' or 'good' your actions are, then surely crime is perfectly justfied law abiding citizens are simply idiots, little better than cattle?
Um, what? Perhaps he means that since we have food to eat and our basic needs are taken care of, that we naturally spend our time writing malware. Apparently people should never have liberty and prosperity, since they obviously lead to (or are intrinsically) vice!
How about reporting what percentage of a country's total software output is malware? Or at the very least, acknowledging that instead of some "capitalist way of life", the problem is a doublethink one for social do-gooders: that our citizens, poor and criminal included, have access to technology and electricity. Don't think for a second that if rural China had electricity, not to mention uncensored Internet access, they wouldn't shoot straight past us on whatever yardstick this bozo is using.
As Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." This is true for all values of liberty, and includes the liberty of running software of your own choice on your own hardware of choice. The market will produce, and already has produced, better systems that aren't (as) suceptible to malware. That's the capitalist way of life. All this guy is doing is hand-wringing and finger-pointing.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
I was employed for a while by U.S. company/enterpreneur, who seemed to be walking along thin line of ethics in engineering, as we'd understand it. Those were attempts to make graspable profit from online presence. Lucky I was not to be exposed to the parts, that would make me uncomfortable in my jobs. But there were more people hired, and at least half of them should have been not residents of U.S. (just as I am not) - some of them should have been doing parts, that were crossing into the darker side, I suspect.
As those were rather short - term profitability efforts (better name it speculation), I doubt any success is still with that business. Wish better luck and models to net enterpreneurs! Garbage of the net is destined to rot.
Servant of karma
Your simulation is quite unrealistic, because it assumes that a dumb user browses crackz & warez sites: this is IMHO quite unlikely. Gamers, power users etc would do it but not your typical dumb user. The problem anyway is not that if you click OK your box gets rooted - the situation is much worse, there are many exploits lying around on warez and pr0n sites and they will root your box silently and without user interaction. This happens because MSIE is a suboptimal browsing platform when it comes to security (and functionality too but that's beside the point).
Usage of different browsers is an easy and good remedy to this situation. In fact, I recommend Opera or FF to anybody who is dissatisfacted with IE.
Global warming is a cube.
We are #1 because Microsoft is based here and all know that their software is malware.
Advert for the Economist at the moment reads:
"Invest in the 4th largest world economy. Before it's number 1. China"
I think that you have hit upon it. A computer behind a NAT firewall can stay uninfected (even without AV software) if a user restricts her/his browsing to the more mainstream segments of the web. From my experience, computers with spyware/malware/trojans/viruses mostly have contracted the problem from at least one of the following ways:
While I'm aware that there are other ways to get your computer infected, they just don't happen that often. My wife has been using an XP Pro box w/o AV for a couple of years without incident or malware. Her web habits are scrupulous--all she does online is shop and check her yahoo mail account.
In my opinion, the worst thing for a computer is to have a teenager operate it. I reinstall Windows all of the time for people with teenagers and within six months, it's back to be wiped again. Apparently AV & firewall software does no good if you always click "allow."
Visit anywhere in China that isn't Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong and tell me it's not a "developing" country. I have no experience with Russia, on the other hand.
Since when is criticism equal to hate?
...or so it seems.
Since September 11, 2001.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The use of crackz and warez sites is just to accelerate the process. Unless you confine your browsing to only the most trustworthy sites on the net, you'll eventually get infected.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Fair enough, since Russia has no experience of YOU!
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Screw VMWare, an imaged machines
I just listen to the Security Now podcast. Did you know about the virus-like behavior that simply arose because of a bug in Windows? It's called "Free Public WiFi"
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
If Americans did have a high level of technical knowledge, the amount of spyware infections (and related matters) would be significantly lower. Considering we lead the world in malware creation, that argues for a lower level of technical knowledge.
Punch the monkey to win money! Give us your email address and we'll send you free offers! Install this program to prevent infections!
Let's put it this way: I went to the dentist recently and the girl who was going to scrape my teeth asked what I did and where I worked. When I told her I work in IT and for a specific government agency, she said that she wished she knew more about computers but she didn't have the time to figure them out.
So, we have someone who admits they don't know enough about a subject yet aren't willing to take the time to learn more about it. Yup, this America. If it isn't easy, we're not interested.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Yes, it certainly is developing!
"" How about taking the safety labels off everything, and let the stupidity-problem solve itself? """
USA! USA!
While I realize that there are philosophical differences over cultural values and all that, I think it's foolish to say we can't make judgments on what constitutes a "better" life.
I think, for example, that it's pretty fair to say that a life of hard labor in a concentration camp would suck ass compared to the life of just about anyone outside of said concentration camp. I think it would also be fair to say that it would be much better to live in a country with relative freedom and financial prosperity than to live in one with biting poverty and brutal, senseless violence.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Did the author of this post even read the paper? The U.S. leads the world in Malicious Activity, this is very different from malware. Malicious Activity = phishing sites, attacks, command and control servers, bots, spam zombies and malicious code infections. The United States is the top country for the combination of all of these things. The paper does not state anywhere that the United States is the source of the most malware!
At last, America is a technical leader again!
Depends on how you look at it I suppose... The US is obviously still developing too. It's like a 50 yr old calling a 20 yr old a kid, then being told by an 80 yr old that he's still just wet behind the ears himself.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
I think you are confusing patriotic with moronic. Typical lefty mistake.
We're number one!
We're number one!
Yeah!
I think you could replace "warez" with any number of NSFW porn terms and turn up the same things, and idiot users do troll for porn. And I'd argue that a lot of idiots who don't know what they're doing, end up at cracks/warez sites too ("hey, my friend said I can get expensive games for free..."); you're assuming a lot of intelligence on the part of people who are Googling for and clicking on the top results for obvious terms like "serial number crack" and the like.
But anyway, I really only included that step to guarantee a quick powning of the box; you could probably -- as you point out -- achieve the same result without clicking "OK," or even going to that many really obviously shady sites, just by browsing for long enough.
And although I've never tried it, I suspect you could also get easily hacked if you just put the VM's IP address in your firewall's DMZ, so that it's exposed to the public network, and then just walk away for a few hours. That's probably a more interesting experiment, but if you just want to see how messed-up you can get a Windows machine in 15 or 20 (or 3) minutes, the hack'n'crack sites are a guaranteed reservoir of nastiness.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Very interesting. I wasn't aware of that, and I'm now glad that I wasn't using VMWare in the NATed configuration (although, IIRC, that is the default!).
I prefer to let the VM's virtual network interface talk to the LAN and get its own DHCP lease and IP address, just to make it easier to determine what traffic is coming from the host and what's from the guest, if I want to analyze traffic at the router or somewhere else downstream. I'm not sure what VMWare's lingo is for this type of setup, but it's pretty trivial to change during the installation/setup process. For some reason they recommend the NATed setup, I suppose because some networks are configured to disallow more than one IP lease per physical Ethernet port, but as long as you control the LAN as well and have internal IPs to spare in your addressing scheme, you might as well not introduce the extra layer of NAT (or, it would seem, the security vulnerability).
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
We're number one! We're number one! We're number one! Take that China!
Let's be realistic.
The past six years has been rather hard on the American programmer.
We were pretty much always looked down on by the rest of society as a bunch of geeks, and no small number of us were picked on growing up just because we were studious and not particularly into sports. For a few years in the late nineties, we got a little bit of respect, and it was good. But we got deluged with carpetbaggers who claimed to be programmers after a weekend HTML course, until the word "programmer" barely meant ANYTHING. Finally, the bubble burst and the carpetbaggers were scattered to the wind, but in the process we got leveled right along with them. And the outsourcing boom has killed the market value of our skills, exactly as the bastard corporations intended.
The worst people on Earth, the people who run these corporations, happily betray not only their own countrymen but their fellow geeks in some cases (Fuck YOU, Bill Gates) when they tell our idiot Congress that Americans aren't smart enough, talented enough, skilled enough, GOOD enough to fill the positions they've got on offer.
They have the nerve to post job offers that insist on expertise in twenty different in-demand skills for a lousy 40K sub-entry-level job. Then they claim they made a good-faith effort to find someone to fill it and hire an Indian on an H1-B, paying him as little as possible.
In the end, the market for the American programmer is being demolished. We have all been sold out, viciously, because we wanted to be paid a fair wage and some filthy rich asshole with more money than he could ever spend wasn't willing to pay what we were worth.
Now it seems that a portion of these disenfranchised technologists have decided to become vandals. Well, CRY ME A RIVER.
As you reap, so shall you sow. It's the way of things, really.
Maybe you should have thought of that.
NO CARRIER
It seems all the sciences/engineering/tech fields got hit. Anything where lots of effort went into training.
I can understand the businessmen and their concerns about getting cheaper skilled labor. Its the same concern I have when I can get cheaper stuff.
My main concern is with Congress, and how they've been passing all this one-sided law.
Outsourcing labor, Fine! But what happens if I try to buy a CD which is cheaper in China than here? Can't do that! Its a Violation of some businesses' marketing model. Well whoop-de-do, we have a "marketing model" too! We paid in both time and dollars for our education, and we are paying a hefty income tax if we are making enough to keep a roof over our heads... and that "business model" needs protection too.
Of course, business can get labor somewhere else cheaper. Those people do not have to pay US property or income tax, or have the cost of living overhead we have here. I can get my music cheaper too if I don't have to pay all the RIAA overhead, but somehow skitting around paying the RIAA is considered illegal, but outsourcing skills is simply business. RIAA cannot compete with damned near free. Neither can I. We protect RIAA with DMCA. Either provide me housing, food, and creature comforts at foreign rates and relieve me from taxation - or protect me too, or my kind will cease to exist.
Personally, I am perplexed, as I have a lot of skills in refrigeration design, and its quite obvious to me how to design HVAC systems that take advantage of ice baths to store enthalpy so not only can I time-shift the energies required to transfer enthalpy (BTU's of heat energy) to times of abundant power in the middle of the night, I also take advantage of radiating the unwanted heat to deep-space much more efficiently than when I have a 6,000 degree kelvin heat source overhead during the day.
Not only that, I have a whole bag of evaporative cooler and other tricks in my bag to make SEER soar. There are a whole mess of tricks like using gravitic pressure assist to keep refrigerant from flashing before it hits the thermal expansion valve, or using pipe-in-pipe methods to recycle heat flows. These have to be custom-designed for the application for maximal efficiency.
There is a whole mess of new technology here to be explored. Brand new scroll and screw compressor designs coupled with SEMA motors and International Rectifier drivers, driven with custom programmed AVR micropower controllers. Yes, like Linux, it will take some time to set up, but once its running, and people understand how it works, it will work as long as you want it to. Efficiently. And if something better comes up - if you know how the thing works, its easy enough to integrate it in.
But what happens? The powers that be want an off the shelf box, just like in your field, they want a windows box. Anything so they don't have to understand what they have. Just use it.
We cannot thrive on ignorance!
From what I see, we are rapidly approaching "peak oil" and energy prices will soar. Trying to tell the executives about this is just as hard as selling them on a Linux system. They will pay whatever it takes to have the mainstream unit, no matter how virus prone or inefficient it is. A big company offers them the comfort of being held blameless for going that way, no matter what goes wrong. Its the little guys who stand to profit/lose personally which seem far more likely to adopt innovation than the corporate leviathans.
It seems a shame when I see so many technical people underemployed when I feel our country needs us more than ever. At least the kids can see us and avoid our mistake like the plague, and get their tra
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]