Cape Town, 20 Oct 2005
Egos play a central role for those who design and distribute malicious software, with success measured by the number of machines they have infected and bring under their control, says Greg Day, McAfee security analyst.
"Turf wars between virus writers are common. They often write protocols that search for other viruses and then try capture those machines away from them," Day told ITWeb during the McAfee "Live Attack Roadshow" seminar held in Cape Town yesterday.
"For instance, we have picked up online exchanges between the Bagel and Netsky virus writers that egg each other on by trying to show who is better," he says.
Sven Jachsan, the 18-year-old German author of the Sasser and Netsky viruses, is serving a community service sentence after having been found guilty of causing malicious damage to computer systems.
Day says the next biggest security threat comes from "bots", short for "robots", software that takes over the running of a computer without the user`s knowledge.
"At one stage it seemed like the proliferation of bots was out of control with some 10 000 new ones identified. IRC bots are the most common in that it is the best way of gaining backdoor entry. However, many companies have now put in protocols banning the use of Internet chat rooms," he says.
Day says the bots are particularly dangerous as they slowly evolve over time in an attempt to stay one step ahead of security systems.
"Bots have been used for malicious denial-of-service attacks in many countries. Some Web sites even offer the rented services of bots for a certain amount of time," he says.
An instance of this, says Day, is a small Internet service provider (ISP) in the US city of Boston, which used bots to initiate a denial-of-service attack against its opposition in order to gain market share.
"The affected ISPs grew suspicious when they noticed that ISP suddenly running quality of service adverts at exactly the same time their systems were experiencing difficulties."
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