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Virus Authors Give Out Early Holiday Gifts
Jeremy L. Muncy
Staff Writer
2004-12-17
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Another seasonal mass-mailing worm that poses as a holiday e-card is being distributed by virus writers. The new holiday worm is being called Atak.H.
 | | Happy Holidays From SecurityProNews... |  |
Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research for F-Secure has stated "There are different levels of risk with these e-mail Christmas cards. It's very similar to past ones we've seen. There's little risk in sending Christmas cards, but there is in opening them. We recommend people to send old-school Christmas cards because there's no security risk in that."
The worm, which was discovered Wednesday, contains the subject line "Merry X-Mas!" or "Happy New Year!" The body of the text reads: "Happy New year and wish you good luck on next year."
Some odd occurrences with the new email are it doesn't contain a Trojan horse, a tool that virus writers use to take remote control of computers. Hypponen has said that is very strange. Another is that it is very similar to the Zafi worm, by the way it sends itself to everyone in the victims address book, but unlike the multilingual Zafi, Atak is only sent in English.
Microsoft Patches Making The Holidays Better For Network Administrators. Five patches were released this week to fix nine security issues with the Windows operating system. No critical patches were released, sure to make most IT people happy.
Stephen Toulouse, a security program manager in Microsoft's security response center said "All the flaws have something about them that makes it more difficult for an attacker to exploit them."
The latest five patches in December mark the last scheduled ones for this year. If Microsoft doesn't release anymore within the remainder of the month, it will have released 45 patches this year, down from 51 in 2003.
Could Virus Authors Be Going After Desktop Search? Some security experts are starting to warn that virus writers could be going after the increasingly popular desktop search.
"Desktop search products are very efficient at harvesting data, so it wouldn't be surprising if exploits are sought by malicious coders. Any software that can index and capture data on a user's PC will be subject to virus and Trojan exploits. It is just a matter of time," Foad Fadaghi, senior industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan Australia said.
According to Neil Campbell, the national security manager of IT services company Dimension Data, it's unlikely that virus writers will start targeting the new tools immediately, that's only because they aren't common enough yet.
Symantec Is Shelling Out Some Big Money For Veritas. Security software maker, Symantec Corp. has agreed to buy Veritas Software Corp. for $13.5 billion. This deal expands Symantec into the backup and recovery software market.
"The new Symantec will help customers balance the need to both secure their information and make it available, thus ensuring its integrity," John Thompson, chairman and chief executive of Symantec, said in a statement. He said customers want to cut the complexity and cost of managing their IT infrastructure and drive efficiency with fewer suppliers,
The combined company will operate under the Symantec name. Symantec's Thompson will be chairman and CEO of the new company, and Gary Bloom, chairman, CEO and president of Veritas, will be vice chairman and president.
About the Author:
Jeremy Muncy is the editor of http://www.SecurityProNews.com.
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