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Spikes Detected In Autorun Malware
msm1267 writes "Researchers recently have seen a major increase in the volume of autorun malware in some countries, thanks to a couple of new worms infecting those older machines. The two new worms, Worm.JS.AutoRun and Worm.Java.AutoRun, both take advantage of the autorun functionality to spread, and the JavaScript worm has other methods of propagation, as well. Researchers at Kaspersky Lab say that the volume of autorun worms has remained relatively constant over the last few months, but there was a major spike in those numbers in April and May, thanks to the distribution of the two new pieces of malware."
Yes. Whenever windows sees new data from any source, it immediately executes it... for security reasons ya know.
Not really. That security hole was patched over four years ago. What does happen is that when removable media is installed, the user is prompted for what to do; this can include opening the folder to view the files, or running a setup file if one is present. Yes, if someone *chooses* to run the setup.exe file and it's infected, then they can get a virus or trojan. But that's part of the cost of having an open platform without executable signing. The only way to eliminate this risk would be to force the user into a walled garden. That may be feasible on smartphones and tablets, but it's not acceptable on workstations.
>autorun.inf
The most dangerous thing to ever come out of a computer company. That this feature made it past review demonstrates the utter disregard for the most basic security at all, especially since boot sector worms had been around for years in DOS and Win3.1 before Win95 ever graced us with its presence. Since Windows 95, it's been trivial to write auto executing code because Microsoft deliberately yanks down the pants and underwear of the end user and says "Go to it!"
You're indulging in some 20/20 hindsight here. At the time Windows 95 was released, the only media that supported autorun.inf on insertion was CD-ROMs. (Floppy disks didn't do this, if only because the OS could not reliably detect when a disk was inserted in the drive.) Remember, at that time, CD-R drives were not mainstream computing devices; they were still very expensive and rare. (According to Wikipedia, the first CD-R drive under $1000 was not released until September 1995.) When Windows 95 was released, the idea was that only pressed CDs would autorun, and presumably MS thought that the vendors could be trusted not to ship malware. (The Sony rootkit scandal proved that was a mistake, but no one anticipated something like it at the time.) And let's be honest, in 1995, IT security wasn't really on the radar for home users.
The real problem came with Windows XP. By this time, recordable CDs (and, later, DVDs) were commonplace. But Microsoft's biggest mistake was reusing their autorun code for other forms of removable media – such as thumb drives. Again, when thumb drives were first released, they were pretty expensive (I remember paying $100 for a 1GB thumb drive about a decade ago), so the best explanation is that Microsoft didn't think it likely someone would put malicious software onto a thumb drive and just leave it laying around or give it away – at the time, that would have been a rather costly strategy.
Over time, as thumb drives became dirt-cheap, it was clear that allowing INF-based autorun on rewritable removable media was a bad idea. It probably shouldn't have taken Microsoft until 2009 to get rid of this. But the decisions made earlier in the process were not as clear-cut as you're making them out to be.
No doubt we'll see more of this type of article for the next year as the drive to bury XP intensifies. It's not going to yield the results they expect, but hey.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The terms "closed platform" and "walled garden" have a very specific meaning, and it doesn't apply to Windows. From Wikipedia (my emphasis):
It's obvious that Microsoft has absolutely no control over what software can be run on Windows. Compare that to Apple's iPad, where you can't install anything that's not approved by Apple (unless you jailbreak it first). That makes iOS a "walled garden".
Now, maybe we agree that it was foolish for Microsoft to enable any kind of "autorun" feature. The point is that in an "open platform" (that is, one where the user has complete control over what can be run on it), the user must also have enough power to do dumb things like running an unknown program from a pendrive that was just plugged in. How easy it should be for the user to do that is another discussion.