Doomsday malware: It's only a matter of time
One of the few benefits of being old is that even if your memory is starting to fade, you can still remember more history than the youngster next to you. That's why I'm always sent the latest malware reports by friends, coworkers, customers, and other reporters, then asked to gauge the seriousness of the latest supposed superthreat.
For example, a friend recently brought my attention to a detailed rundown on the ZeroAccess/Sirefer malware program. It's a doozy -- besides being a rootkit botnet program, it creates its own hidden partition on the hard drive and uses hidden alternative data streams to hide and thrive. I'm impressed ... sort of.
Longtime antimalware experts are rarely bowled over by new malware. Most of the threats are retreads of programs we've seen dozens of times since the 1990s. Malware that hides from prying eyes and antimalware software? Hiding techniques were in the very first IBM PC computer virus, Pakistani Brain, from 1986. Malware that encrypts data and asks for a ransom to provide the decryption key? That started with the AIDS Trojan in 1989. Polymorphic, ever-changing, hard-to-detect malware? Try Dark Avenger's Mutation Engine from March 1992. He confounded the world's best antivirus expects, including John McAfee, for most of the next few years.
