2002 Marked by Sophisticated Attacks

A short anti-virus 'roundup' for the year 2002, what kind of new threats will we see coming next year ?

Quote:

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The year 2002 has been characterized by new types of security threats -- more sophisticated and potentially dangerous threats.

A new report just released by security company F-Secure Corp. of Alexandria, Va., tallied 80,000 known viruses. The company also notes that security administrators and CIOs were plagued this past year by hybrid attacks, virus outbreaks on Linux sytems, attacks using open source code, and an escalating activity among Asian virus writers.

The full story can be found here

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~micael

micael,

I was just wondering and pondering, is it possible that some of the 80,000 viruses could have been created by the anti-virus software industry to keep themself in business ? Very lucrative business isn't it.Is anyone monitoring ?

Dr_Evil

Good question Dr_Evil.

This has been a subject for questions many years. And yes it's a lucrative business, and who knows the truth behind all viruses ?

I do know one thing and that is that many of viruses are submitted as samples directly to the AV companies without gaining public access and only a few of them are found in the wild after they are submitted. The numbers of viruses mentioned in this article does probably not show 'in the wild viruses', but all viruses examinated by the AV company.

~micael

Also, as far as I'm aware even the slightest change to a virus means it is listed as a 'new' virus, so I`d question whether there are even half that many. Of course, if you think making a slight alteration to a virus means its a new one that fine, but as far as I'm aware Ebola has a few strains, they all have seperate names, but are all ebola viruses and count as one virus with a few strains, maybe that's how virii should be classified......

Sounds like a good idea R0n1n, is there a formal clasification for computer viruses? Would be one hell of a project to undertake.
I should think it is quiet posible the AV companies create new variant of viruses themselves, but I doubt it is intended to generate revenue directly, probably so they can create better heuristic scanning code.