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Porn diallers and Trojans - the new face of malicious code
By John Leyden
Posted: 01/10/2002 at 11:34 GMT
The profile of malicious code on the Internet is changing with
porn diallers and Trojan horses becoming more serious problems.
A study on the malicious code blocked last year by managed services
firm MessageLabs finds the spread of Trojan horses is becoming more
organised.
From recording Trojans sporadically, MessageLabs is now intercepting
40-50 Trojans at a time. These are systematic attempts to infect
victim's machines, it says.
Sex diallers are another growing problem. These change the number
used by dial up connections to expensive premium rate lines.
Such programs, which are regularly modified by their creators and
pose legal problems for AV firms. By adding detection for the
programs (which don't load without user interaction) the vendors
could be accused of restraining trade. One man's malware is
another's useful utility.
MessageLabs gets around this by filtering (quarantining) such
traffic rather than deleting it. During 2001, the vast majority
of viruses blocked by MessageLabs were Word macro viruses but
few achieved any prominence. Built by s'kiddies and using the
same infection techniques time and again most AV tools with
heuristic functions easily detect such nasties, said Alex Shipp,
a senior anti-virus technician at MessageLabs.
Word macros also pose a lesser risk because Office 2000 requires
macro code to be signed, so that the spread of such viruses is
becoming more constrained, he added.
Shipp is slightly more concerned about the risks posed by script
viruses which, as the Kournikova worm proved, can spread rapidly
if rates of infection reach a critical mass. Again, virus writers
are failing to exercise much "imagination", and this is keeping
the problem under control, MessageLabs believes.
Because there are so many ways to write Windows executable viruses
form the main danger going forward, as there are so many ways to
write them, Shipp said in a presentation at the Virus Bulletin
conference in New Orleans last week.
Add in the increased use of exploits used by spammers in virus
writing and the war between VXers and AV vendors is moving to a
new battleground, he says.
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Regards
Trev
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