The latest VB100 test on Windows 7 Pro resulted in a pleasingly high pass rate, with most products having no problems with the WildList or a set of clean files. John Hawes has the details.
Even in July 2000, Martin Overton feared that if we didn't break out of the ‘virus-scanner-is-king’ mindset, we would be doomed to keep repeating the same mistakes forever. He put forward some suggestions for dealing with the then-current malware problems.
Gamker is an information-stealing trojan which uses simple decryption, then drops a copy of itself using a random filename and injects itself into a different process. Raul Alvarez looks into its code injection routine and at the twists in its API-hooking routine.
Eugene Kaspersky describes the headache facing the virus analyst of 1999.
Nearly a year after the Microsoft takedown of Vitalwerks’ dynamic DNS service No-IP, the NJRat malware campaign has re-spawned and has started making its way back to No-IP’s DDNS domains. This time, however, the malware authors are more cautious and they are finding several new ways to escape anti-virus detection. Abhishek Bhuyan and Ankit Anubhav take a close look at the Middle Eastern NJRat campaign.
Shortly after the publication of the 1994 NCC survey on breaches of IT security, Chris Hook asked: what is the nature of the real virus problem, and how much does it cost?
Ever since the emergence of anti-virus products a few decades ago, they have been criticised by others in the security industry for overstating the virus (or malware) problem, and for failing to provide ample protection. Industry veteran David Harley never tires of responding to such criticism. He points out not only that much of the criticism is based on a serious misunderstanding of what anti-malware (as it’s more accurately called today) does, but also that those marketing these products could do a better job at pointing out that running an anti-malware solution isn’t enough to protect against today’s threats.
In the 1980s, no one left home without their Filofax. In 2000, no one left home without their Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), the functionality of which was moving rapidly towards that of a desktop computer combined with a cellular phone. Eric Chien looked at the malicious threats to the Palm PDA - which could be called the precursor to today's smartphones.