Topic: Venerable viruses become outdated by new threats

[Clive]

PC-Pro

UK security specialist Sophos has released its top ten virus for the first half of the year, and the message is clear: ignore it.

Made up in the main of Netsky, Zafi and Sober variants, a good number of the ten most virulent viruses have been around more than a year. And while they continue to be a perennial pestilence clogging up bandwidth and inboxes, they don't paint an accurate picture of the true battle going on.

With such venerable viruses still charting, one might be forgiven for thinking that the writers have grown tired of their hobby. Sven Jaschen was caught some time ago, yet was responsible for four of the viruses in Sophos' top ten. 'It's true that hasn't been any new major virus outbreak so far this year,' said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant. 'But the numbers of new viruses we're seeing increased 59 per cent year on year.'

Sophos says it catalogued nearly 8,000 new viruses in the period January to June of this year, compared with just shy of 4,700 for the same period in 2004. In May and June the figures more than doubled year on year, showing how the growth is magnifying month by month.

With such vast numbers of malicious code patrolling the wires, the web is a dangerous place to be.

Connect an unprotected computer to the Internet and there's a 50-50 chance it will be infected within 12 minutes according to Sophos' most recent tests. And that's without opening a browser. At the beginning of the year the figure was 22 minutes. If you leave that computer connected for 40 minutes there's now a 90 per cent chance of infection. This means that many new computers may become infected before they have even downloaded the various patches and updates needed in order to secure themselves.

Cluley says that ISPs have to take greater responsibility for their subscribers by implementing security across their networks as well as shutting out IP addresses in their space that they are aware of as zombie nodes or are being abused in other ways. Many of the computers still sending out the endless copies of NetSky, Sober and Zafi viruses that make up Sophos' top ten, Cluley believes, are poorly protected and ill-used consumer machines left hanging on the Internet with the owners stumped as to why they are running so slowly.

On the flip side, there needs to be a greater amount of political pressure and educational initiatives on a broad, national scale to make people aware that if their machines are exhibiting such behaviour, they may be responsible for sending out viruses. But also to show people how to use computers safely and avoid them becoming seen as more trouble than they are worth.

'If there was something like a cycling proficiency test for computers with a certificate at the end of it, that would help immensely,' he said.

Cluley is in agreement with a recent Gartner report that suggested predictions of an imminent flood of viruses on mobile phones were greatly exaggerated. 'The real virus threat today is on Windows desktop computers,' he said. 'As far as we can tell, there's no demand from customers and no-one's making money out of [antivirus for mobile phones].'

And a combination of increasingly stringent legislation making spamming more difficult to do legally and a spike in interest from the criminal underworld is creating an underground with its sights set on extortion and identity and financial theft, rather than the glory of writing the first effective virus for a mobile phone.

Cluley said he expects numbers of attacks to continue to rise against the mundane desktop PC, as attackers release a multifarious array of Trojans and backdoors, spyware and keylogging code. But also that attacks will increase on other platforms as extortionists target systems at the network perimeter with denial of service attacks.

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