January 2006 Virus and Spam Statistics

Ant writes "Commtouch reports the January 2006's virus and spam statistics. Its summary said there were four massive virus attacks (including a multi-wave attack of 7 variants) and the most aggressive attacks penetrated before the average antivirus (AV) solution could even release a signature. The data is based on information continuously gathered by the Commtouch Detection Center, which analyzed more than 2 billion messages from over 130 countries during the month of January 2006..."

Problematic Signature Release Issue

[wormnet.org]

Not very long ago, when the Kama Sutra (Nyxem.E, MyWife, whatever) worm was released to the world it seemed to take absolutely forever to find anyone with a solution for the removal or even the detection of the thing. I think it was almost a full week before the signatures were widely distributed. Even though this was a attack was very mild (as far as viruses are concerned), what would have been the outcome had this been "the Big One"?

What are the long term trends of spam?

[antifoidulus]

That is some interesting research(only 5% of spam is porn?!), but where is spam headed long term? They have that little graph were you can see trends for 30 days, 100 days, or 12 months(though the 30 days and 12 months didn't work for me in Safari), but does anyone have reliable statistics that go back farther?

Is spam burning out, finding new markets, or are people just continuing to send spam even if they don't make a profit on it?

A brief summary of my experience

[Opportunist]

What's coming down our road is a lot more 0day exploits. WMF was the tip of the iceberg.

What's also coming is "multi facetted attacks". I.e. spyware and adware that is being used not only to display pesky ads but also used as a foot in the door to install malware on your PC (i.e. malware that's MORE destructive than just popups).

What I foresee as well is that trojan writers will make more and more use of crippleware that's installed by third party software (for example, software that's supposed to ensure you don't break copyrights). Simply because this kind of software is more or less omnipresent (or will be soon), while not going through the rather strict screening process that normal OS modules go through. Yes, no matter what you think of MS, their soft is one of the best tested in the world (in the non-open source world at least, screening in OS outmatches it by magnitudes).

The goal for virus and trojan writers isn't anymore the spreading and the rather masturbatory enjoyment of knowing your virus spreads like crazy. Money's made its way into the trojan biz. And 3 goals are predominantly present:

1. Spambots
2. DDoS sheep
3. Phishing

While 1 and 2 have already had their heydays, phishing is strongly on the rise. I can say without breaking any NDA agreements that we are currently facing very well organized, very strongly pushing phishing attacks targeted at passwords for the "usual" targets (amazon, ebay, paypal), as well as a lot of national and international banks (online banking is something I would not really do right now on a Windows-based system...).

The organization behind it is stunning. Ways to launder the money that makes some old mafia tactics look bland. Update cycles and update services for those trojans that rival or outmatch large corporations.

Teach your peers. Tell them about it. Tell them to friggin' install that damn antivirus tool. And to upgrade their Windows. And most of all, to finally abandon that insecure webbrowsing pest that comes with every MS System!

Spam is here to stay

[Opportunist]

First of all, spamfilters, no matter how good they are, won't solve it. Who has filters? You, me, the rest of the "clued" people. But we wouldn't click on a spam ad anyway, would we?

The people who do click on one simply have no clue what's going on and thus have no spamfilter. So spamfilters are simply for our convenience of not having to deal with junk.

Laws won't make spam go away. Unless you have a globally universal and most of all equal law concerning spam, all it does is to go to another place. And since making spam legal equals tax income for a country, I'd give a the possibility of the RIAA realizing that copycrippling their music isn't the right way a higher chance of coming to reality.

So Spam is here, and it's here to stay. It will maybe become more sophisticated, and it will most certainly become used by people wanting to plant other malware onto your system (e.g. the combination of spamming a link and planting a bogus WMF onto the referred site).

But Spam won't stop.

Re:Problematic Signature Release Issue

[wormnet.org]

I take it you haven't heard of AVG. They already detected it (without releasing a new signature) on Janurary 16th.

Oh yeah, I tried that as well, but as far as I can tell, it was zero day and nothing was working. Of course this was an email worm and it was not on one of my own machines. First and foremost, the first line of defense for this sort of thing is education. If we didn't have people out there that would open any attachment they receive, we wouldn't have anywhere near the problem with this sort of attack. Unfortunately, relying on the end user to make sure their own computer is secure is a pipe dream at best.

This proves antivirus is useless

[J0nne]

If this report proves anything, is that running antivirus software is not good protection. You have to educate users not to open suspicious attachments, not to run IE, and to keep their systems updated (every modern OS does this automatically! Windows also does this since SP2). A firewall and/or NAT router is always a good idea too.

I don't run antivirus (except the occasional ClamWin run if I downloaded something I don't trust completely), and I manage to keep my computer clean just by following the above rules. Antivirus won't protect you from ad/spyware anyway, and these things have become worse than viruses.

If the antivirus vendors can't keep up with new viruses, you might aswell stop paying for antivirus. After all, it won't protect you.

Re:Maybe I'm being paranoid...

[Opportunist]

1. No, thank you. We got enough work analyzing and prodding viri, we don't need to write them. We get them, for free. Why bother working more than you really have to?

Detach yourself from the idea of the "fun" virus that spreads, displays junk or wipes your hard drive. Those are becoming fewer and fewer. The "new" generation of viri and trojans have a very defined goal: Making money for their creator. Either by using the infected machines for another attack (use it in a DDoS blackmail attack), gathering your passwords to steal from you directly (paypaling your money away or "making" you buy their stuff for horrible prices at EBay) or use you as a relay station for spam and other malware so it cannot be traced back to them (and spam being the most harmless of them).

2. I do admit, we sometimes exaggerate the threat. Not for our personal gain. People don't go out and buy antivirus soft just because the threat level is rising. There're a LOT of free antivirus solutions that are by no means worse than commercial products, and a lot of commercial products do have a non-commercial free version.
But, for example, because the trojan poses a threat to the net as a whole while the damage to the single machine infected would be minimal. Why should YOU care, if YOUR damage is low? People are selfish like that, unfortunately.

3. Something you won't see soon again. There was a quite nasty lawsuit against a German antivirus company for labeling some adware correctly as adware. I certainly wouldn't label anything that's not most certainly BAD BAD BAD software bad. The lawsuit is right at your tail if you do.

Antivirus is NOT useless

[Opportunist]

It's just not the perfect cure. When you install an antivirus suit and consider yourself completely safe, click on everything you can because "hey, I have antivirus, I'm safe", you're in a very dangerous misconception.

I mean, you do wear a condom when having intercourse, right? But still you don't do it with people of "questionable background", right? Why?

The best protection is still having an antivirus suit and behaving like you don't.

Re:indemnification against viruses

[URSpider]

Why don't they make an OS that is immune from getting viruses just by clicking on a hot link or opening an attachment?

Because it's very, very hard. First of all, users are constantly demanding that progams interact with each other, and with each other's data. This gives the web browser permission to pass that hotlink off to another piece of code and process it, sometimes without your intervention. It's these hand-offs that cause the problem. All it takes is one good buffer overflow error to drop some virus code into the instruction queue, and you can make all kinds of interesting things happen. Programmers are learning to add boundary checks to their code, but every now and again, someone's going to make a mistake. Not to mention, many viruses today are actually straight-up executable code or scripts that users are fooled into running.

And, if that attachment is an executable, then no operating system ever created, or that ever will be created, can stop you from clicking your way to oblivion (unless you completely remove the ability for users to execute programs other than some pre-existing sub-set, which is completely impractical).

All you Linux users out there, stop snickering from behind your keyboards. I'm willing to bet there are one or two good holes in Firefox that could be used to install malicious code on a Linux box. Sure, it would run as the individual user, not as root, but that's not going to matter much when your ISP cuts off your data pipe because 'dumbuser1' has a spam bot running in the background.

"AVERAGE anti-virus"

[Avohir]

they never note specifics on which anti-virus performed how well, Their tests are based on the AVERAGE time to detect and the AVERAGE number of viruses missed. Not all anti-viruses are created equal, and some are distinctly less equal than others. Symantec and McAfee in particular have abysmal response time in updating their definitions. Granted since they're much bigger than their competitors, and with size comes sluggishness, but I've personally submitted samples to them and had to wait weeks before the definitions were added. That kind of delay is inexcuseable (if it takes that long to review samples, hire more people!)

Also, when you take into account that McAfee detects fully half the files with any sort of file packer used (thats what they call 'heuristics', they've detected Hijackthis as a virus during 4 separate updates), you have to wonder how they can miss actual viruses with such a "shoot first and fix false positives later" mentality.

as a positive counter-example, NOD32 and Kaspersky generally detect a new threat within an hour after they first see it, if their heuristics dont already pick it up.

When it says that its the average of 21 major anti-virus vendors, I question whether the statistic is meaningful with so broad a spectrum of response times

Re:Oh yes it is!

[isorox]

I have never been infected

How do you know?

Re:This proves antivirus is useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I certainly wouldn't call AV software useless... It's a good first line of defense... But it certainly isn't a silver bullet.

A lot of AV software out there is simply crap to start with. It burns up your system resources and doesn't even protect you properly. The problem is, your average user has absolutely no way to judge what is "good" AV and what is "bad" AV. Every box out there claims to be the best, and every self-respecting geek has a strong opinion about which brand is the best.

Even if you get yourself some "good" AV, it's only going to be as protective as you let it. If you disable all the assorted protection and download an attachment called "lesbians.mpg" anyway, you're pretty much doomed. No AV out there can protect you when you intentionally circumvent it.

Finally, education goes a lot further than any software ever will. If you know enough not to download the attachments you're going to be vulnerable to a lot less stuff.

What is really necessary is good AV combined with education and, where available, sysadmin-imposed security policies. Only by combining those things are we actually going to be able to curb malware. Everything else is just a bandaid solution.

Re:A brief summary of my experience

[tinkertim]

Some of us are attempting to do something about it. While I have much to finish about the project you can read a little here [netkinetics.net]. Check out OpenSDS.

Most of your phishing is originating from shared web hosting servers. This is because quite often they do not verify their accounts and offer instant account setup with unadulterated access to exim. Check your spam headers and see how much came from "nobody".

The other problem is insecure scripts, or scripts made insecure due to a lack of knowledge on the part of the host.

You're not going to teach john q hosting reseller the basics of securing Linux and PHP. You can, however write scripts and release them. Make them work on all popular hosting platforms. You can also design simple opt-in centralized mod_sec rules that can be implemented in scripts like phpbb, etc as opt-ins by the user.

Hosts hate centralized blacklists because it causes user complaints. So one is needed where their users have control over their vhost. It can be done its just a pain. Someone should make it easy so I figured I'd try.

Users are demanding full access to all popular features. Hosts are giving it. Until someone else makes them secure it (or makes it effortless) , enjoy your spam .. its just going to be a fact of life.

So yes, spam is here to stay unless people get off their duffs and do something about it :) If the end result is the problem reduces significantly then any effort is worth it, funded or otherwise.

off the box.