Net criminals shun virus attacks
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Hi-tech criminals are turning away from viruses to mount the most serious attacks, warn security experts.
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Most users think their computer is safe from adware and spyware--but they're wrong.
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Viruses and worms just keep getting smarter and more devious. While the best defense is not opening e-mail attachments, you still need a solid antivirus program.
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Hackers are close to finding a way to spread harmful computer viruses just by getting people to open an e-mail message or visiting an infected Web site, computer security experts warned yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - Malware-infected botnet PCs have overtaken denial-of-service attacks as the top security issue facing Internet service providers and other Web infrastructure hosting players, according to a new survey of the organizations. Arbor Networks published the results of its third-annual Infrastructure Security Report on Monday -- a survey of 75 large ISPs, hosting companies, and other providers -- which found for the first time that botnets currently outrank DoS threats as the most serious concern for the firms. Tens of millions of PCs are likely infected with botnet programs worldwide, according to survey results, and Arbor researchers said the ISPs they questioned admitted to spending more time and resources battling botnets than ever before. Infrastructure providers are finding botnets hard to pin down, as the people responsible for controlling the zombie machines are increasingly employing more advanced detection evasion techniques, said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor. As they can't accurately gauge the size of the problem, he said, infrastructure providers are afraid they're only scraping the tip of the iceberg in taking on the botnet phenomenon. "ISPs are spending a lot of time trying to measure, and there's a lot of subjective data, but there are such widely different qualities to the various bots that it's a real challenge to get any strong metrics," Labovitz said. "We are seeing a widening separation between the pros and the amateurs, but as easy as it is to infiltrate and measure the less sophisticated botnets, the pro grade stuff is far more problematic and harder to trace." By using the same peer-to-peer botnet propagation strategy that has made the so-called Storm worm a recurring problem in terms of generating subsequent infections, the sophisticated sect of the botnet community is moving forward at a rapid pace, according to Arbor. In eliminating the need for traditional botnet command and control centers using P2P techniques to distribute the threats, the attackers have also removed the most efficient place to attempt to take down the attacks, the researcher said. At the same time, denial-of-service (DoS) attacks -- which have long-ranked as the primary concern of ISPs and their brethren -- have not disappeared, but rather become more targeted and efficient in the application of their resources, making them even more damaging to their individual targets, according to the report. Labowitz said that while a traditional distributed DoS threats have measured at under 10GB, newer DoS attacks are reaching as high as 24GB -- enough to completely shut down a smaller ISP or Web server farm. As the attacks are getting more powerful, they are also being concentrated on smaller groups of individual targets, or groups of sites, versus being unleashed to the Internet at large. In one such situation just last week, Labowitz said, an unnamed gambling site was taken offline for a number of hours. "For the most part, if you read the press you don't hear about DoS as much, so people jump to the conclusion that it's not happening. But it's still out there," said the researcher. "The attacks may only be targeted at a small group of sites, but that can also help to increase the significance of the impact to the provider involved based on the more narrow focus." Despite the lingering threat of DoS, ISPs have become better equipped at warding off the attacks and protecting their customers, and often times have begun charging for premium services to address the issue, according to Arbor. As opposed to five years ago, when infrastructure players often had to scramble to respond to DoS campaigns as they emerged, Labowitz said most sizeable companies now have appropriate procedures and equipment to at least partially deflect the assaults. "Even though 90 percent of the attacks are a soft threat at this point, some of those remaining attacks are bigger than anyone can handle easily -- even some of the big guys," said Labowitz. Arbor predicts attacks on Internet telephony services will represent one of the next immediate pain points for infrastructure players. Only 20 percent of the companies surveyed for the report said they had any gear in place to detect VoIP threats. Only 11 percent reported that they had any plans or tools in place to mitigate VoIP-based attacks. "We haven't seen many of these threats yet, but we know the proof-of-concepts are out there," said Labowitz. "With the amount of VoIP infrastructure that is being deployed, the ISPs and telephony providers will need to ensure that they have something in place to protect those networks from attack."
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Infected computers can be used as &quot;zombies&quot; to send spam or launch attacks on Web sites. Spreading Trojans via chat rooms is not unusual.
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Science & environment: Creators of malware are no longer script kiddies after kudos - they're criminals after your cash. Wendy M Grossman asks if protection can keep pace with them.
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User-generated Web content is becoming a target for hackers and cross-site scripting attacks on Web sites can lead to malware taking over the browsers of machines that use the sites.
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Experts say viruses don't pose a serious risk to handheld devices--yet.
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'Virtual security solution' is designed to slow virus and malware attacks.
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There's no time off from Internet threats, as flaws in Firefox, IE and Mac OS X open the door to attack.
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Revamped Norton AntiVirus, Personal Firewall, and AntiSpam tools fight pests and dangers online.
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Worried about catching viruses, spyware, or other malicious software while surfing the Web?
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Security researchers studying the latest Internet crime trends have discovered a new Eastern European website that uses a large botnet to infect vulnerable PCs. The operators of the botnet and website charge clients for each successful PC infection.
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(InfoWorld) - Though Internet-crippling virus attacks now seem to be a thing of the past, PC users didn't feel a lot more secure in 2006. That's because online attacks have become more sneaky and professional, as a new breed of financially motivated cybercriminals has emerged as enemy No. 1. MicrosoftÂ patched more bugs than ever and whole new classes of flaws were discovered in kernel-level drivers, office suites, and on widely used Web sites. Vendors' chatter about security is at an all-time high, but the bad guys are still finding lots of places to attack. And, oh yes, spam is back. Following are five of the top computer security stories in 2006. Cybercrime dividends Hackers teamed withÂ professional criminal gangsÂ in increasingly sophisticated computer crime operations aimed purely for profit. Much of the trouble centered on phishing, a type of attack where fake Web pages are constructed to harvest log-in details, credit card numbers, or other personal information. Credit card numbers are often sold online to others for illicit gain. In May, 20,000Â phishing complaintsÂ were reported, a 34 percent increase over the previous year, according to U.S. Department of Justice report. The U.S. hosts the largest percentage of phishing sites, it said. But law enforcement agencies are getting more organized and cooperating better, particularly in international investigations. At least 45 countries participate in the G8 24/7 High Tech Crime Network, which requires nations to have a contact available 24 hours a day to aid in quickly securing electronic evidence for trans-border cybercrime investigations. The private sector has also helped. Microsoft filed dozens of civil suits and gave information to law enforcement for criminal cases in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States against alleged phishers throughout 2006. It's a brand new 0day With automatic software updates now the norm, hackers have been forced to look a little harder for ways to put their malicious software on unsuspecting victims' PCs. In 2006 they turned to zero-day attacks as never before. These attacks take advantage of previously unreported flaws in software, and in 2006 they became a top concern, according to the SANS Institute. In fact, hackers kicked off the new year in 2006 by releasing zero-day attack code based on a flaw in the way Internet Explorer handled WMF (Windows Meta File) documents. This was followed, later in the year, by a rash of very targeted online attacks that exploited unpatched flaws in Microsoft's Office software. In fact, MicrosoftÂ warned of the latest such attackÂ -- this one targeting a flaw in Word -- just this Tuesday. To underline the scope of the zero-day problem, security researchers launched widely publicized "Month of Kernel Bugs" and "Month of Browser Bugs" projects, during which they exposed a new, unpatched vulnerability in browsers and operating systems every day for a month. Spam avalanche Microsoft's Chief Software Architect Bill Gates predicted two years ago that spam would be gone by 2006. He should check his in-box. Rising volumes of junk mailÂ nagged IT administrators throughout 2006. Up to 90 percent of all e-mail was spam, depending on the vendor recording the statistics. Spammers found creative ways to circumvent security software. Image-based spam, where individual messages appear to be unique by subtracting or adding pixels, foiled some security techniques. Spammers also put messages in the images themselves, a tougher challenge to stop since it requires processor-intensive optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. Spam remained the delivery vehicle for other malicious software such as keystroke loggers and rootkits in addition to promoting links to phishing sites, which often aim to steal financial data or log-in credentials. Web 2.0 gets Hacked 1.0 MySpace.com may be a poster child for Web 2.0, but from a security perspective, it hasn't been looking so pretty. That's because the popularÂ social networking site was hit hardÂ this week by a password-stealing worm that exploited a scripting vulnerability on the Web site. And this was not even the first worm to hit MySpace. In October another more benign worm, called Samy, automatically added a Los Angeles teenager's name to visitors profiles, quickly making him appear to be the most popular member of the MySpace community. Security experts say that the kind of cross-site scripting attack used in the recent MySpace worm has become much more prevalent in the past year, as hackers have discovered just how much can be done with these attacks. These bugs can be used to do far more harm than many people realize, security experts say, including forcing PCs to download illegal content, hack other Web sites or send e-mail. Vista lockout irks vendors MicrosoftÂ rankled security vendorsÂ by saying it wouldn't allow their software to access the kernel of the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Patch Guard, Microsoft's kernel security technology, blocks access to prevent unauthorized modifications by malicious software. Vendors, led by Symantec andÂ McAfee, arguedÂ they needed access to the kernel to detect malicious software such as rootkits, which burrow deep into the OS. After a flurry of public statements and pressure from the European Commission, Microsoft agreed to make APIs (application programming interfaces) available. The APIs will allow host intrusion prevention technologies used by vendors to function without hooking the kernel. But Microsoft said the APIs wouldn't be ready until the release of Service Pack 1 for Vista.
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Many of you can't be trusted with your own computers. Stupidity isn't the problem. It's laziness, mostly, combined with a penny-wise stinginess that resents the $40 price of a good antivirus program.
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Online security experts urge computer users to update their systems&#39; antivirus measures, after a wave of attacks by the Zafi.d worm that have swamped thousands of e-mail servers.