Viruses & Malware

The results come despite 95 per cent of people claiming to use antivirus or firewall software, according to the findings from moneysupermarket.com.

Of those who have suffered an attack, 39 per cent described the assault as causing a major disruption to their system. A further one in 10 (10 per cent) said the attack, rendering their computer unusable, and one in twenty (5 per cent) admit to having personal information stolen.

There are pieces of malware that make a big splash such as Conficker and then those such as Coreflood that for a variety of reasons do a better job of flying under the radar. In the end, the long-term success of a piece of malware to a large extent depends on it being able to avoid both detection and sustained scrutiny by the security community. Doing so can allow attackers to build mammoth botnets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers - or, in the case of Conficker, millions.

As the folklore of the Web goes, one contracts a computer virus in places analogous to where one might contract certain types of real viruses: in "bad" neighborhoods one shouldn't be in the first place. But times are changing, and though New York City cleaned up Times Square, cybercrooks are setting up shop in some of the Web's busiest places.

If ever there was a good reason to keep your computer spyware-free, this is it. Last month a group of more than 100,000 Windows-based PCs saw their operating systems self-destruct, after the botnet that infected them issued the “nuclear option”. Little-used, though apparently present in several different types of trojan, the “kos” or “kill operating system” command basically wipes access to the user’s system.

The Conficker worm, which has set off many a recent security alarm bell, may just be a small fry, compared to the growing number of botnets, viruses, and worms infecting cyberspace.

According to a report released on Tuesday from security vendor McAfee (PDF), cybercriminals have hijacked 12 million new computers since January with an array of new malware. This represents a 50 percent increase in the number of "zombie" computers over 2008.

Unless you've been living in a cave for the last week, you've witnessed the wholesale hysteria being launched over the recent Swine Flu outbreak..

All this panic over a simple strain of flu got us thinking about some of the more virulent computer pandemics that have hit in recent years. While a computer virus pales in seriousness to a human outbreak, malware attacks can still take a huge toll on businesses throughout the world.

The image of virus writers as intelligent kids with too much time on their hands resorting to digital vandalism to entertain themselves persists. Years ago, making such a guess about why people write viruses might have been accurate most of the time, but the world has moved on. The writers of viruses and other mobile malicious code are many and varied, and their reasons are as wide-ranging as they are themselves.

Over 300 critically important medical devices were connected to the Internet, infected with the Conficker virus, and then could not be fixed for 90 days because of federal regulations.

The medical devices in question were used in hospitals to allow doctors to view and manipulate high-intensity scans like MRIs. They were often found in intensive care facilities, and were connected to local area networks along with other critical medical devices. These network connections exposed the medical devices to the Internet, from which they became infected with the Conficker virus.

TWITTER, the microblogging service, has major holes in its security, a London conference will be warned this week.

Graham Cluley of antivirus firm Sophos says the Twitter website is vulnerable to viruses written in the Javascript web-programming language. These viruses can then send out short messages or "tweets" in the user's name, perhaps sending their friends to phishing sites.

"A couple of hours after Twitter says it has [a virus] under control a new worm appears using the same attack," Cluley says.

The Conficker worm's creators are evidently toying with ways to put the pervasive computer virus to work firing off spam or spreading rogue anti-virus applications called "scareware."