This past week, Kaspersky Lab's released a blog on Viruslist "Malware Evolution: January - March 2007". It outlines the ongoing internet battlefield between different criminal gangs.
The blog outlined the problems in the first three months of this year:
"The situation was becoming more and more interesting. Three groups, from different countries, who were all busy with the same thing – creating botnets to send spam and harvest email addresses. All these groups are dependent on money from spammers, who will pay good money for the biggest botnet and the largest database. This brought the three groups into conflict with each other, and they are willing to use everything at their disposal to gain an advantage. The result was an unending cycle of attacks on users. In order to infect machines, the virus writers had come up with newer and newer methods to evade antivirus filters."
The blog concludes with "The events of the first three months of 2007 confirmed our worst fears. Virus writers are still continuing to organize multiple short term epidemics by releasing numerous variants of a single malicious program onto the Internet in a short space of time. Naturally, this makes life more difficult for antivirus companies. Vista became a target for hackers, who were not only searching for vulnerabilities, but also for ways to evade some of the security features such as UAC, Patch Guard, and protection against buffer overflows."
Read this blog. It will provide you with an excellent overview of the state of the war against criminals.
Guy
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com
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