This week computer viruses celebrate 20 years of causing trouble and strife to all types of computer users. US student Fred Cohen was behind the first documented virus that was created as an experiment in computer security. Now there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace. Virus writers have adapted to new technology as it has emerged and the most virulent programs use the net to find new victims and cause havoc. Now most viruses arrive via e-mail Attack mode Mr Cohen created his first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California. Others had written about the potential for creating pernicious programs but Mr Cohen was the first to demonstrate a working example. In the paper describing his work he defined a virus as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a ... version of itself". Mr Cohen added his virus to a graphics program called VD that was written for a make of mini-computer called a Vax. The virus hid inside VD and used the permissions users had to look at other parts of the Vax computer to spread around the system. In all the tests carried out by Mr Cohen the virus managed to grab the right to reach any part of the system in less than an hour. The fastest time was five minutes. The creation of the virus gave rise to such consternation that other tests were banned, but Mr Cohen did manage to demonstrate a similar virus working on other computer systems. Viruses used to travel via floppy In the paper Mr Cohen prophetically wrote: "they can spread through computer networks in the same way as they spread through computers, and thus present a widespread and fairly immediate threat to many current systems." Soon after this pioneering work viruses written for the IBM personal computer, which had only just been created, started to appear. The first of these is widely acknowledged to be the "Brain" virus that emerged in 1986 from Pakistan and was, apparently, written to help its creators monitor piracy of their computer programs. The emergence of Brain kicked off lots of other viruses such as Lehigh, Jerusalem, Cascade and Miami. All these were aimed at PC users and travelled in floppy disks that passed around as the programs they held were used on different computers. Though they were a nuisance to those they caught out they were something of a rarity. Windows world Efforts to spot and stop viruses forced creators of the malicious programs to find ways of hiding their creations sometimes by making them change form to avoid detection. The Love Bug tricked many people into opening it In 1992 the Michelangelo virus, that was due to strike on 6 March, caught the media's attention but the chaos it was predicted to cause never materialised. As Windows emerged virus writers began targeting the new operating system. This led to an explosion in so-called "macro" viruses that exploited the crude utility writing program in Microsoft Word. These viruses were much more widespread because people shared far more documents than they did the programs that early viruses piggy-backed upon. As Windows has emerged in successive versions, virus writers have kept pace with the new technology. The Melissa virus that struck in March 1999 marked a new trend as it combined a macro virus with one that plundered the address book of Microsoft Outlook to e-mail itself to new victims. The success of Melissa was largely due to the fact that the net was becoming increasingly popular and the most successful viruses of recent times have exploited weaknesses in e-mail programs or net connected PCs. Almost every year since 2000 has seen the unleashing of a virulent program that uses the net to travel. The Love Bug struck in 2000 and was followed by the Nimda and Code Red viruses that swamped net connections. More recently we have had Sobig, Palyh, Slammer and MSBlast viruses that have spread further and caused more havoc than early virus writers could have ever imagined. Source: BBC News
Yeah 2 fingers up to the :swear: that create hassle and trouble for perfectally good people... *end rant*
msblaster, the most infamous worm of them all. How many countless minutes of my life i wasted watching the timer count down while i tried to get the damn av to finish d/ling its update before it rebooted. that was before i knew the shutdown -a command, still... and then sasser a and b got me the day they were released into the wild.
Yeah, I'm in no rush to cut the birthday cake Unfortunately, things are probably going to get worse: New year brings fresh security fears By Mark Ward Technology Correspondent, BBC News website Everybody knows that the pace of change in the technology world is relentless and that today's hi-tech hotshot can be tomorrow's also ran. Change also happens quickly in hi-tech crime circles. What was a popular technique or target one month may fall out of favour quickly. In 2005 the increasing speed with which computer security firms react to new strains of viruses, spyware and other malicious programs was motivating tech-savvy criminals to find fresh ways to frustrate us and separate us from our money. Business as usual To begin with the loud background noise generated by security problems in 2005 looks set to continue in 2006. The opening three weeks of 2006 saw the debut of more than 40 Windows viruses, almost all of which are variants of well-known malicious programs. Some viruses now have many hundreds of variants. Many of these are being written so they can be used to make money for their criminal creators. "It's about the crooks," said Philippe Courtot, founder and head of security scanning firm Qualys. Mr Courtot said the net was hugely attractive to criminals now because so much commerce was generated via the net. The lure of tapping into that flow of cash was proving a real draw. "There's real money to be made," he said. Security experts see novel threats emerging on several fronts. They expect to see attacks coming from countries with little or no history of producing computer criminals. They also expect 2006 to see malicious and criminally minded hackers embrace new technologies and exploit the more collaborative ways of working the net permits. Chris Boyd, security research manager for FaceTime Security, said he had seen evidence that hacker groups in the Middle East were starting to mount attacks. Digital detective work led him to think that the groups were based in the Middle Eastern nations. In the past many nations named and shamed as hacker havens, such as China, have only hosted the machines compromised by malicious hackers in other nations. Phishing attacks are getting more sophisticated Mr Boyd said the Middle Eastern groups he was keeping an eye on were hatching very sophisticated attacks. One group had set up a large 'bot net of more than 17,000 compromised PCs that they could control remotely. It was also experimenting with the BitTorrent file-sharing system to download data to these machines. Evidence for the emergence of the Middle East as a fertile region for hacker groups came out in late August 2005, when two men were arrested in Morocco and Turkey for their part in creating and distributing the Zotob worm. Download threat The writers of viruses and spyware are also searching for new ways to get their creations on to users' PCs, said Simon Heron, technical director at security firm Network Box. One likely avenue for attack would be poisoned music and video files, he said. The growing use of portable media players, smart phones and high-capacity flash drives meant more and more people were carrying around media. Few people were aware that media files could harbour viruses, spyware and other trojans said Mr Heron. "Because of the massive increase in interest there are a lot of downloads going on," he said, "But most people think of it just as music or video." It can be costly to fix an infected PC There were also hints that malicious hacker and criminal groups were starting to target the tools that people use to collaborate at work. Attacks on instant messaging networks continued to rise, said Mr Heron, and were likely to grow as the separate systems started to work together much better. IBM, in its annual Global Business Security Index report, said that attacks launched by criminal hacking groups were getting much more finely targeted. Phishing gangs in particular were moving away from blanket e-mail campaigns and now preferred to exploit much smaller groups. Such attacks, called "spear fishing" disguise e-mail messages to look like they come from inside a company often from the human resources or technology support sections. "The attacks are tuned to make it look like they are from organisations we would usually trust," said Nick Coleman, IBM's head of security services. Statistics gathered by IBM suggest that the numbers of phishing e-mails in circulation is rising. In 2004, every one in 943 e-mail messages was a phish. In 2005 the figure was one in 304. Figures gathered by Telewest suggest that protecting yourself against viruses, phishing attacks and other mail-borne attacks can be expensive. The average cost of fixing or replacing a computer infected by a virus comes out as £261.61 according to its estimates. "The cost of leaving your PC open to infection is not to be sniffed at," said Philip Snalune, a spokesman for cable firm Telewest.
