Predicting Malware

Pseudonymous B*ard writes "SANS has an interesting article showing how to predict what forms future malware will take. For example, last year there were many hurricane-related scams, while this year, another bad hurricane season is predicted. SANS has noticed that the scammers are gearing up for this and that many new domains with the words Alberto, Beryl, donation, and hurricane have been registered (Alberto & Beryl are the first two names on the hurricane list). The only question now is whether hackers will be able to preempt any of these scams before they have a chance to be used?"

Big Surprise

[Umbral Blot]

Summary of article: malware authors may try to take advantage of disasters. That's not exactly cutting edge reporting. What I would be more interested in hearing about is if malware authors start creating rumors of disasters in order to cash in anyways if nothing bad happens. Let's say Alberto fizzles. Will we still get spam asking for donations to help the newly homeless? I guess I'll have to wait and see.

Fake news

[dj245]

I would be most impressed if someone created a bunch of fake news sites that claimed that Alberto was a great disaster and millions of lives were lost with the flooding in, say, North Carolina. And blasted the mainstream press for not carrying this most important piece of national news in this great crisis. And then pointed to websites collecting donations for the millions of displaced and homeless people.

Go on, then, get to it.

Who is SANS, anyway?

[tb3]

I have to ask this, just who is SANS, anyway? We get tons of alarmist reports from them, but nobody ever checks the source. I haven't been able to find much more than this entry on Wikipedia: "The SANS Institute (SysAdmin, Audit, Networking, and Security) is a trade name owned by the for-profit Escal Institute of Advanced Technologies. SANS provides computer security training, professional certification, and a research archive . It was founded in 1989."

And Wiki doesn't even have an entry for "Escal Institute of Advanced Technologies". Try Google, there's also next-to-nothing there. I don't like placing a lot of trust in something when I don't even know the source.

Does anyone have any more information?