Computer Viruses Broke 100,000 In 2004

Sammy at Palm Addict writes "The count of known computer viruses broke the 100,000 barrier in 2004 and the number of new viruses grew by more than 50% according to news from the BBC. The BBC also reports that 'phishing attempts, in which conmen try to trick people into handing over confidential data, are recording growth rates of more than 30% with attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated.'"

Could we have a distinction here?

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

Now how many non Windows viruses were there? You could probably count them on one hand. Let's give credit (or blame) where it is due.

Distinct virsues?

[Rick Genter]

Should we really consider the dozens of variants of Bagle, Netstky, etc. separate viruses? Just because the anti-virus vendors choose to implement recognition of these variants by separate signatures, are they really different viruses?

I think it would be more interesting to know how many new virus/worm/trojan families were released year-to-year.

double counting?

[Lawrence_Bird]

are they all unique? Or are many of them variants on an original? Seems to me we should only be counting big version
numbers and not the updates

How many of these viruses are linked to spam?

[Lisandro]

That would be an interesting figure, and i guess it'd be pretty high. The ammount of mail traffic due to zombie machines spamming is amazing.

Re:Could we have a distinction here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bollocks. Apache has many times more installations than IIS, yet you have more IIS exploits than Apache. Marketshare != Exploit/Attack share.

Better headlines please.

[northcat]

The first thing I thought when I saw the headline was 'broke 100,000 what?'. The headline should have been better, like 'crossed the 100,000 barrier' or just 'crossed 100,000'.

So, who's responsible?

[WidescreenFreak]

The problem with this topic is that Microsoft is always blamed for making an inherently insecure operating system. They are also to blame because of "too little, too late", aka. activating the firewall by default only in SP2.

But quite frankly the ISPs and of course the individual users are to blame as well.

Why don't broadband ISPs require boradband firewalls? Only recently have some of them started to incorporate firewalled modems, and even then they're only sent to new customers. Would this mean that existing customers would have to spend money for a new router at the ISPs demand? You bet. But given the choice between disconnection or buying a $50 router, I'm sure that the vast majority would find a way to get that $50.

Additionally, most virii are sent over SMTP ports since they contain their own SMTP servers. I would not be against shutting down direct-from-client SMTP as long as those who run their own mail servers have the option of having their specific connection opened for SMTP traffic.

Finally, the users absolutely MUST be educated. There are enough free tools out there that no one should be unprotected. But again who should be responsible for teaching these end users?

At this point I would actually welcome something like a drivers license for broadband access. You don't gain the ability to use a broadband connection unless you prove to the ISP that you know the rules and that you are informed of how to be a responsible Netizen, including the use of firewalls, virus scanners, and alternate products like Mozilla, Eudora, Firefox, and others. If you break the "law" afterwards, your broadband privileges are revoked until you come into compliance.

If people were made aware that any virus or worm outbreak cause by them would mean the complete loss of their Internet connectivity, I think we'd see the number of virus infections drop dramatically.

But have an ISP do the responsible thing at the risk of pissing off customers? No, they'd rather spend billions of dollars a year on mail storage, spam-fighting hardware and software, increasing bandwidth usage, and always-rising amounts of mail to [e-mail]...and of course pass those charges onto us.

Re:not suprising

[WidescreenFreak]

Accidentally

Have you noticed that when it comes to computers the relatives always replace had a major lapse of common sense and with accidentally?

"So, you accidentally received a piece of mail from someone you didn't know, you accidentally opened it up to see what it was, you accidentally moved the mouse over the attachment, and then you accidentally double-clicked on the attachment just because it was there? Oops! I accidentally just formatted your hard drive. Do you have your installation CD?"

Re:Percentage of Windows Boxen

[PyroPunk]

I always see these comments, but I want to know; if the mass of people using Windows today all switched over and were using Linux tomorrow, do you honestly think all of a sudden the computer world would be a safer place? Do you envision this utopia where all users suddenly start keeping their machines up to date to thwart off the latest exploit? Would we suddenly have ma and pa computer user logging into application.bugzilla.com and filing bug reports? If a trojan/worm/virus/etc was sent out and the user got infected and a dialog popped up saying they had to enter their root password to run it, do you think these same users that download everything off the net, always just click "yes" without reading anything, are going to say "if I log in as root I can cause serious damage" and not log in as root? no, a majority of them will log in as root and get exploited.
The only difference I see will be all the Linux zealots either a) switching to another OS because now it's not 1337 to be running Linux or b) the same people that blame Microsoft for all the users problems, will now start blaming the user (instead of blaming Linux).

strcpy, providing freedom to crackers since 1972!

[ratboot]

Viruses still exist because programmers still use obscure C functions full of holes and obscure processors full of executable stacks.

Please programmers, read the electronic paper "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" (->Google).

zzz

Re:It's time Windows included a basic anti-virus t

[stratjakt]

If you were paying attention, you'd have noted that not only is MSFT developing it's on AV tool but they also plan their own spyware scanner/remover.

Windows 3.0 had MSAV, are any /.ers old enough to remember that? They abandoned it, deciding it was too much work to maintain something that, at the time, wasn't viewed as a necessary compnent. And it wasn't needed, in a simpler, kinder, pre-internet world.

In the wild?

[slavemowgli]

How many of those are actually found in the wild? 100,000 is a big number, but ultimately meaningless when you want to assess the risk posed by viri etc. Throwing around big numbers like that is more the realm of marketing than that of engineering. :)

Re:not suprising

[Wordsmith]

And can you tell me what about common (non-geek) sense suggests that opening up an e-mail and the included file should be at all hazardous? Common sense suggests you should jsut get to see what's in the file. If it's junk, you'd delete it.

Unless you've been specifically told otherwise, it wouldn't seem dangerous at all. When you open junk mail at home, or mail from a sender you don't recognize, you don't expect it to take pictures of your house and mail them back to the sender. You don't expect the opened mail to leave dogcrap on your doorstep or make your refridgerator stop working. It seems like a fairly harmless thing to do.

It's only because of severe design flaws in e-mail programms and OSes that there's an issue.

Re:not suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that it's possible to protect a computer without bothering to switch from x86 to PPC, right?

I use Windows because I'm a gamer. I love Linux. I love the idea behind the open source community. But I also wanted to play Half Life 2.

It's very simple to correct these problems. I use Firefox, and I check Windowsupdate on a weekly basis. With the exception of cookies, I havn't had anything detected from Spybot in the past year or so, since I switched to Firefox.

eBay phishing scam I got

[YukiKotetsu]

These things are looking more and more realistic/genuine all of the time. The last I got I opened up the email just to take a look, and the reply to address was "cgi.ebay.com/cgi-bin/"whatever else... it looked so nearly authentic it was scary. Everyone sees the cgi-bin at the ebay page, so having the name cgi.ebay.com was just... yah... I see why people fall for these, they are just uninformed, thinking someone actually was trying to steal their eBay account and such. What needs to be done is when you sign up for stuff, you are required to read aloud to a microphone some statement about how the company will never send you emails to verify account information, social security numbers, and so on. It's the only way to guarantee they read it, but perhaps they still wouldn't understand it. It's just scary. What we need is to make a global law about these things as well... if you are found doing this sort of act, you and your whole immediate family is executed in front of a live TV audience. I bet it'd get higher ratings that Survivor!

Re:not suprising

[isecore]

I spent hours fixing my little brother's (14 yrs old) computer. Firstly they are on dial up so that was why it took so long.. just downloading Spybot etc.

As a fellow roaming techsupporter (parents, witless friends) let me give you a little advice:

Invest in one of them small USB-memory drives. 128 megs is fine, go for more if you feel like splurging.

I've quickly discovered that these things are solid gold when dealing with different computers in different locations. Just slap Ad-Aware, Spybot and whatever else pieces of software you need onto that thing, and take it with you. Works like a charm. Then all you need the Internet for is for definition-updates and even those don't take years to download over Dial-Up.

Nerd

[the_mad_poster]

Yea... because hard drives never fail outright or suffer physical damage that prevents normal access to the data on them..... in fact, when that happens, it's because your neighbor's computer running Windows picked the lock on your front door, went into your den, and damaged the drive on your 1337 Lunax machine, right?

Re:Could we have a distinction here?

[jwdb]

None of the Unix or Linux viruses became widespread

I'd believe the statistics in this article if it weren't for this last statement. Remember a famous worm, spread through unix sendmail, some time around 1988?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm [wikipedia.org] - It exploited a number of unix vulnerabilities, along with guessing common passwords. Luckily for us, he supposedly made a mistake in the reproduction rate and the worm ended up spreading to every connected computer in a matter of days.
His intent was to make a slow worm, and had he succeeded it would have gone undetected far longer.

Worms and viruses that spread like wildfire are actually a boon - a burning car draws attention, a rusting one far less.

Jw