Martijn Grooten warns against reading too much into a drop in the average spam catch rate of products in this month's VBSpam review - which may be caused by the natural volatility of spam.
Over the years, investigations undertaken by the UK's Police Central eCrime Unit (PCeU) have led to the arrest of several individuals involved in computer crime and, as part of international operations involving security firms and foreign law enforcement agencies, the takedown of a number of botnets. Kevin Williams looks back at a number of successes of the PCeU, which he helped set up in 2008.
Professor Klaus Brunnstein was one of the biggest names in anti-virus research, a pioneer in the field whose career was never short of either controversy or success. In April 1996, VB spoke to the man himself about his background, his career, his views on the industry and his home life.
The first 'multicellular' virus, Dichotomy, had ‘odd’ and ‘even’ components. When a file infected with the ‘odd’ component was executed, the virus looked for a file infected with ‘even’ code, installing itself into memory only if that part was found. Eugene Kaspersky - who believed this was only an experimental virus, which could never become prevalent in the wild - provided a full analysis.
RMNS was the second known ‘multicellular’ virus. Its code was divided into two parts (‘male’ and ‘female’). The two parts of RMNS installed themselves into memory independently of each other, but infection could only take place if both sections of the code were resident in memory at the same time and on the same computer. Eugene Kaspersky brought us the details of this ‘electronic creature’, which at the time, he believed would begin the era of viruses of a specific sex.
On 4 May 2000, VBS/LoveLetter.A, also known as LovLet, ILOVEYOU and Love Bug, wreaked havoc across the globe and pushed the anti-virus industry to new limits. Joe Wells reflects on the day the industry failed to protect many of those who depended on it.