Is my paranoia valid?

A few months ago I stumbled across this site looking for antivirus information. Now I try to visit the site daily because of other security issues, but my primary interest is antivirus. (I guess thats the territory when your the AV guy)

Anyways, August was the most busy month for virii ever, SobigF was slamming everyone like crazy, Minmail and a whole host of other virii all at the same time.

Now its been quiet for almost a month now. While there has been a few more come out, nothing like the slamming of having been attacked by several large virii, and many spinoffs. Does this mean that something bigger is in the works? Or are the average users getting wise to computer security and AV in general making these not so bad?

Has anyone else began to wonder??

there's no pattern to it, BUT i think we can expect to see a new worm based on the rpc/dcom3 exploit.

Like Tedob1, I don't think we can go by patterns or trends....Its whenever someone comes up with a good idea to be malicious, or "kooky" that we'll see some more stuff come out. You just have to hope its not as good as the ones we've been hit with recently, where you have all these different variants of the base code of a highly expandable and exploitable virus.

Hi thadbeme,

I am going to be a little cynical here?

Nothing for the last month?..........could that be that they are back at school/college/university?

I do seem to see a pattern that matches those periods in the year, particularly when it comes to lame copies and "clones".

I also think that ISPs and mail providers are getting more responsible, if only to protect themselves and their bandwidth.

I accept that there are people of my age who write malware, but not many? I strongly suspect that the "Magistr" virus that came out a while back was written by a Russian guy of around my age. Please remember that "technical authorship" and "distribution" are quite different. Just look at Bill Gates and DOS for that :)

Before anyone accuses me of "ageism"...........if you had the choice between writing a worm/virus and earning $2500, which would you do? Those who can earn, do; and do not have the time to mess about, I would have thought.

I also think that recent malware has galvanised some sysadmins into taking a proactive approach to patches.

Just a few thoughts

Cheers

I'm actually rather surprised that we have yet to see some massive worm exploit that rather famous botched patch that M$ released. After I heard about that, I thought for sure we'd be seeing a new variant of Sobig and Blaster all over again. Or is this the rpc/dcom3 exploit that Tedob1 was mentioning?

alpha

Waiting for a major virus to hit is akin to living in San Franscisco and waiting for "The Big One."

Nobody can predict when either will happen with pinpoint accuracy, but everybody knows that both will shake the Silicon State sooner or later.

Seriously though, all you can really do is keep your systems and software updated and hardened, and subscribe to early warning newsgroups with hopes that your network will not fall prey to the next intrusion.

Good Luck! We will all need it!

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Originally posted here by thadbme
Or are the average users getting wise to computer security and AV in general making these not so bad?

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The average users are not learning... at least the average users around my area who know me...

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Just because your paranoid, dosn't mean their not after you

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Yea, there might be something else happening, but something tells me, these virus writers are normal-ish people, and they had more time during the summer than they would normaly, thus, the explosion of infections right towards the end of the summer.

- Noia