Top Viruses, Worms and Malware in 2006

An anonymous reader writes "HNS is running an article with a list of those malicious codes which, although they may not have caused serious epidemics, stood out in one way or another. Some of the categories are: the biggest snooper, the most moralistic, the worst job applicant and the most tenacious. From the article: 'The most competitive. Once the Popuper spyware has installed itself on a computer, it runs a pirate version of a well-known antivirus application. Far from trying to do the user a favour, it is actually trying to eliminate any possible rival from the computer. It seems that the fight for supremacy has also reached the world of Internet threats.'"

Idiots, this makes the problem only worse!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that initiatives like these only make the problem much worse and that the people writing them are mere idiots who don't bother to think about the possible consequences. Yes, some people may consider this informative as a way of being kept up to date as to what has happened in the past year. The people who created and spread all this garbage may very well look upon this with a whole different attitude: "Look at that, see, I R teh l33t coder! My h4xkZ r made teh top!" resulting in some other lame clueless kiddie who has but one single goal: get into the position his fearsome "I R Kiddie" mentor is or was.

When it comes to controversial topics like virii and such I think you need to be very carefull and also use some form of self-moderation just to make sure the news you're presenting doesn't start to lead a life in itself. You see the same thing happening when a kiddie breaks into a computer system and the marks of a rootkit are all over the place. Ofcourse you inform your superiors and other staff, but you also try to keep the news low profiled just to make sure that if it was an inside job (which is always possible) you don't create situations like: "Whatever crap he can do I can do better!".

So when it comes to lists like these I can't help seriously question the sanity of the people creating them. IMO you're only creating a competition platform for morons who can't do much more than find a rootkit on google and need help from IRC channels to actually install and use it. Quite frankly thats the kind of attention I really don't need at all.

WGA

[Gonoff]

That bit of malware is installed on users machines without their knowledge of what it really means.

It may monitor what you are up to, We don't really know yet.

It may pop a message onto your computer suggesting that you go to a certain website and pay money to some questionable organisation.

A new version is reputed to disable your computer if you do not submit to its blackmail...

The article is wrong and attemts sensationalism

[FliesLikeABrick]

They say that Gatt.A can infect any platform like "omg noes Linux and Mac!" but according to http://www.pandasoftware.com/virus_info/encycloped ia/overview.aspx?IdVirus=122900&sind=0 [pandasoftware.com] the IDA (which it exploits) is present on multiple platforms, but there are other things about windows that made the virus function.

I don't know about everyone else, but this damages the credibility of the article for me.

Re:Top Viruses of 2006...

[spectecjr]

How to infect a Unix or Linux machine:

Automatically through mail? Impossible to do without user interaction, since everything that comes down the pipe doesn't have the execute bits turned on. Anyone who writes an MUA that does that autmatically will be taken out back and hit with the clue bat.

Unless there's a bug in your libpng implementation, and your MUA automatically displays images.