Tricky new malware unnerves security vendors
Published Tue, Oct 31 2006 9:08 AM
Technorati Tags: Computers and Internet
How much spam do you get in your inbox? Nearly 30% of the email I receive is spam. Most of it is from people trying to convince me to buy some worthless stock, to lose weight using their miracle product or get medicines without a prescription. Every now and then though, some random piece of garbage will come through with an executable or a script attached, and a bunch of meaningless drivel for text. Now there's a new low-risk worm that's being transmitted that sends out mass mailings to spread itself, but it plays a new trick...
The code is then capable of downloading new versions of itself as frequently as every 30 minutes from a batch of Web sites, said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure Corp., a security company in Helsinki.
Those new versions are created by a program on a server controlled by the hacker, Hypponen said.
In the past, malware has been known to create variations of itself, but the code to create those variations was contained inside the malware. So when a sample was obtained, security analysts could study it and identify potential new versions, he said.
Now, the hacker's program is compiling the code and rapidly churning out new versions, but analysts don't know how the new code is generated.
Source: Tricky new malware unnerves security vendors
Man I HATE spam. This particular program has hundreds of variants already. Maybe that obnoxious popup in Windows Vista is the way to go. Anytime a machine wants access to the Internet a popup should ask if you requested it... Well, maybe not, that would be pretty annoying too. And the spammers would just find a way to make their worms click the "OK" or "Yes" button.
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