Virus Flood Threatens Home Users.

Virus writers have adopted a new tactic to try to make sure their malicious programs reach as many victims as possible. Many creators of worms and trojans are releasing them with increasing frequency. For a while new variants of one virus, called Mytob, were appearing every hour. Some viruses appear in hundreds of different guises. This tactic is designed to fox security firms that use software to scan e-mail attachments for the signatures of known viruses.

James Kay, chief technology officer at mail filtering firm Blackspider, said the accelerating number of virus variants highlighted the dangers of simply relying on e-mail scanners to catch viruses. This can mean that protection against some viruses, typically ones that appear in small numbers, is unavailable for a long time. These unnamed viruses can then go on to catch out more people than they would otherwise.

If anti-virus companies could produce patches within three hours of the first appearance of a virus, outbreaks would almost disappear, suggests research by Andreas Marx of the independent AV-Test Organisation of the Institute of Technical and Business Information Systems at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg. However, Mr Marx's work has found that although response times from anti-virus companies are improving it still takes them, on average, 10 hours to update scanners and produce patches for new malicious programs.

Wireless Mobile Worms. A New Threat?

The SymbOS/Cabir worm indicates a totally new era of computer worms that will slowly become more popular as wireless smart phones replace current mobile phone systems. The Cabir worm appeared in June 2004, and it has a number of unique features. This worm can run on Nokia 60 series phones running the Symbian operating system. The worm's code is compatible with mobile phones using ARM series processors with Symbian operating system.

When executed, Cabir installs itself into several directories of the Symbian OS intending to make sure it will run each time the user boots the phone. During the natural infection tests, Cabir first talked to a Bluetooth printer, which blocked the worm given that the printer did not support the Object Exchange (OBEX) protocol that is required to send a file. However, the worm successfully infected another phone as soon as the Bluetooth printer was turned off. Cabir is overly active in finding other phones and that can easily drain the battery of the phone similarly to natural situations when your phone is hopelessly attempting to find a provider without finding one in range.

Sure enough, in the future you can expect that worms are going to make phone calls from your mobile phone instead of you. There might be a new era of MMS- (Multimedia Messaging Service) based mass mailer worms as well as SMS- (Short Messages Services) based downloaders, porn dialers, and spammer applications, as well. Who is going to pay the bill?

New generation of ie malware now circulating.

Hackers have posted a new version of malicious software that will make it easier for them to exploit an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser. Based on a critical bug disclosed on March 22 2006, the software was posted by hackers to the Milw0rm.com Web site. Hackers have been using malware that takes advantage of the vulnerability to install unauthorized software on victims' computers.This new generation is considered to be more dangerous, according to security researchers.

Older versions of the malware could freeze victims' browsers for more than a minute, giving them an opportunity to shut down their computers or stop the malicious software before it could complete its work. But the new software works more quickly, meaning it will be particularly effective on older machines with limited memory and processing capabilities, said Craig Schmugar, researcher with McAfee Avert Labs.

The software also uses new techniques to avoid certain types of signatures used by anti-virus vendors, said Aviv Raff, a security researcher based in Israel. "It's much more effective," he said. "I think people should know and understand that ... now they are more vulnerable."