One virus writer 'responsible for 70 percent of infections'

From Zone-H.org:

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Netsky and Sasser author Sven Jaschan, who was arrested in Germany earlier this year, is responsible for 70 percent of all virus infections so far this year, according to Sophos Sven Jaschan, self-confessed author of the Netsky and Sasser viruses, is responsible for 70 percent of virus infections in 2004, according to a six-month malware round-up published by antivirus firm Sophos on Wednesday.

Jaschan was taken into custody in May by the police in Lower Saxony, who said that he had admitted programming both the Netsky and Sasser worms, something that experts at Microsoft confirmed. During the five months preceding his arrest, there were at least 25 variants of Netsky and one of the port-scanning network worm Sasser.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said it was staggering that one person could be responsible for so many infections. Richard Starnes, president of security industry group ISSA UK, was also impressed: "Is he going to put this on his CV?" he asked.

Cluley said there is still a chance that others may be implicated in the Netsky virus, although so far no one else has been arrested.

"The full story of the Netsky gang isn't known yet. We know some of his fellow students have been questioned, but the real motives are not fully known," said Cluley.

According to Sophos, the Sasser worm came out on top with 26.1 percent of infections, while Netsky.P, Netsky.B and Netsky.D take second, third and fourth places respectively. The only non-Jaschan viruses in the top ten are MyDoom.A (fifth place), Zafi.B (sixth place), Sober.C (ninth place) and Bagle.A (tenth place).

"Sasser may have taken top spot, but six of the biggest viruses of the last six months were Netsky and Bagle variants -- these caused a continued nuisance for PC users the world over as their authors entered into a very public game of virus writing one-upmanship," said Cluley.

Starnes said that although Jaschan has been arrested, there are always other people willing to step into his shoes.

"Virus writers tend to grow out of the hobby, but hackers do not tend to stop. There is a high turnover rate in the virus writing community. There will always be somebody there to step in to fill the gap," he said.

Cluley agreed, but pointed out that organised criminals are increasingly getting involved in virus writing and are less likely to be caught because they tend to be more careful.

"There is a greater criminal element in virus writing than ever before. If you are an organised gang making money out of viruses and hacking, you don't go around bragging or having a playground scuffle that results in one of your number grassing you up to Microsoft," said Cluley.

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Here's a link to the original article.

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Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, said it was staggering that one person could be responsible for so many infections. Richard Starnes, president of security industry group ISSA UK, was also impressed: "Is he going to put this on his CV?" he asked.

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damn sure will! I think he will get a job even b4 came out from prison (maybe microsoft will bail him out.. . :D )

70% of infections? That is a big claim. There were several authors that have written hundreds, if not thousands virii, and that includes YAM, NuKE, Phalcon/Skism, and others. Read up on 40Hex... however, these are older infections using ASM.

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That's amazing, 70%... I'd be pretty damn proud of my self to have created such worms to do such an astonishing number of infections

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Why? heh

wow...70%, damn....haha i've been infected with both sasser and netsky....and boy was sasser annoying...lol and my AV didnt detect it!!! but it did detect netsky....I somehow go netsky right after i reformatted my comp...odd....wonder how i got it..lol

-S3nate

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Originally posted here by mrkoww
That's amazing, 70%... I'd be pretty damn proud of my self to have created such worms to do such an astonishing number of infections. :eek:

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why would you create a virus in the first place?

..Or be proud of it. Anyways, yeah I thought I had Sasser on my WinMe machine until I realized it was a smaller, less known virus. Dealt with that and from there went to symantec and learned of Sasser's symptom's in the event I'd be caught by the worm or whatever. Haven't been infected since.

Crap, I haven't gotten any of these viruses on any of my machines :(. The only virus I have ever caught was bloodhound on an unprotected machine but other than that, everything else has been blocked. LOL I kinda feel left out :(


I have cleaned up customer machines which had netsky, sasser, sobig and mydoom at the same time :)

Cybr1d: Consider yourself lucky. Or consider yourself just really intelligent and a really security-minded individual. I've only had a few viruses on any of my machine's but most of them was cause I put them there to test and to look at the coding and whatnot. In my life, I've probably only gotten around 3 viruses that I myself didn't know about or didn't protect from or whatever. Other than that, the rest are from testing purposes on a test box or whatnot.

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70% of infections? That is a big claim. There were several authors that have written hundreds, if not thousands virii, and that includes YAM, NuKE, Phalcon/Skism, and others. Read up on 40Hex... however, these are older infections using ASM.

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its 70% of infections this year not ever :)

v_Ln

Yeah 70% of infection's this year. Meaning a period of 52 week's. Not that much time if you think about it. Also it's not ALL the viruses that came out, just 70% (which is a large percentage, but it's still not all).

Personally I don't see that as any kind of accomplishment! Do you really see that as something to be proud of? Personally I believe that all these people out there spending so much time writing/creating viriuses need to grow up! Don't you think it's kind of childish to do such things? What is the point of fscking up someone else's computer? What benefit do you get from taking out someones home computer? Now corporations I understand I don't agree with it but I understand the reasoning, but home computers? I acknowledge the talent these people have but why don't they grow up and put it to use in the real world? Why don't they use their programming knowledge to do something good for once? If all the knowledge of the viruses writers was used in programming of our OS's and a like I almost gaurentee we wouldn't have POS OS's like Windows because those guys have the knowledge to make it better.

I hope you guys don't take this as an attack on you. If you do I would like to apologize ahead of time.

-_LeeBkr_-

LeeBkr311: If someone could answer that one question, I think that would solve alot of problem's ;). But seriously though, you're right except that ya gotta understand that these virus writer's give some people job's and not only that, but it has helped expand the computer-age into what it is believe it or not.

You will alway's have the bad guy's doing their evil bidding's my friend. However you will ALWAYS have the good guy's (us) fighting against them all the time. :)

I'm glad to see you agree with me and I do understand the jobs they have created but, think about how advanced things could be! What if, we didn't waste so much time, so much energy, and so many jobs trying to stop these attacks? Where would we be then?

-_LeeBkr_-

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What if, we didn't waste so much time, so much energy, and so many jobs trying to stop these attacks? Where would we be then?

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Unemployed and on the dole. :D

That's very true. And some companies would save money from the damage, that part I understand. I dunno, maybe I like the adventure of securing my system even more and being on the lookout for new hazard's. I mean, security would be a little more "boring" so to speak without them. Dunno, it's a two-sided sword to me but I see your point and I agree somewhat with it.

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Unemployed and on the dole.

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Exactly, thank you :D

"Unemployed and on the dole."

lol. Not quite what I meant when I asked the question, but in way you too are right. It's all a bunch what if's, why's, and other unanswerable questions... I guess we can only hope to cope with the way things are now.

Things is there will always be "good guys" and "bad guys". The bad guys want to achieve something and will find some flaw in the OS, application or hardware that they can take advantage of as long as those items are designed and developed by humans. The medium of transmittal or the form of attack will change but there will always be an attack somewhere. To expect it to disappear is, IMHO, putting too much faith into technology and not enough suspicion into human society.

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I guess we can only hope to cope with the way things are now.

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I know I can. I cope very fine actually. And so can you and so can every internet user out there, with the right information and knowledge about viruses and protection from them. I like the quote "Ignorance is Bliss". That's a very good quote, and if half of the 'net's user's weren't so ignorant they wouldn't be in some of the messes that encompass them.

I'm reading a book at the moment, where the Author hypothosizes that: All the people involved in the black arts of computing actually have a possitive effect. As it takes intelligence to exploite a weeknesses in a program and write a virus (catch all in this context). This leads to more intelligent countermeasures. There for, if no one was looking for ways to expoite computers, no one would be defending against these exploits. So we have an ever improving understanding of how computers and software can evolve.

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So we have an ever improving understanding of how computers and software can evolve.

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He/she is very correct. The saying "Necessity is the mother of all invention" is an apt variation of it. Look at what gaming has done to hardware. The reality is if we didn't have all these "bad guys" a lot of the security devices that exist today wouldn't because there'd be no or little need for them.

Hacking
The Art Of Exploitation.

By Jon Erickson

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Originally posted here by kryptonic
why would you create a virus in the first place?

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Because they can...................

As the criminal side escalates its presence in the virus / exploit arena, I can see a time when there will be NO arrests of people for the writing, as those involved will know the consequence of talking out of school (no pun intended) :zap:

The ONLY action seen by ourselves and Joe Public will be the rash of system failures that occur. I cannot foresee the end to virii and the related problems, as I feel that crime has got a new way to make money..........Pay up - or lose your data............

Further education is not the answer IMHO, as these little ba57ards have no respect for themselves, let alone others. :****tards: [edit]Oh dear; no emoticon for that one[/edit]

As for the criminal input........we've ALWAYS had crime, we just have to keep on fighting back.

You also have to remember that you don't always write a program like a virus with malicious intents. Sometimes you want to do something just to prove to yourself that you can. (I'm not saying that's what this guy did).

I've never written anything that could seriously be thought of as a virus, but I've often wondered how I would go about it, and wanted to be able to do it. And as to why these people don't work on os security or have programming jobs instead of writing viruses...I believe there are several answers to that question:

1) Many virus writers probably do have perfectly respectable jobs as programmers, etc.
2) Not everyone who wants a job gets it; if you're a good programmer, but can't get a job because the it market's full, you may be slightly bitter about it :)
3) Maybe they're too young or don't have the qualifications necessary to get a "decent" job.

There are probably many more reasons than those above.

ac

Amazing, yes. Something to brag about? No. Achieving world peace or stopping a war is something you can brag about. Writing 70% of the year's computer viruses isn't IMO.

Who cares... if you've done something just for the sole purpose of braging about it then obviously it wasn't about world peace at all.

TheSpecialist: I think you missed my point.

So sad, dont people have a better way to spend their time?

Wow, Just to add to my other post...lol i reformatted my other comp and once i connected it to the net for about 5 min...i go the sasser virus...so then i just reformatted it again lol

-S3nate

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You also have to remember that you don't always write a program like a virus with malicious intents. Sometimes you want to do something just to prove to yourself that you can. (I'm not saying that's what this guy did).

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I think that used to be true. I can remember back to the days when viruses were boot sector or file infectors, and there was a period of time when the "competition" seemed to be who could write the smallest virus. These HAD to be non-malicious, as there just wasn't room for a payload.
:)

Also, a lot of trojans/worms have very similar properties to legitimate remote management and software distribution tools.

IMHO it all boils down to purpose and intent, and I do not think that these guys' intentions were in any way honourable, or educational :(

just my thoughts

Heh, just goes to tell ya that right after an installation you need to have A/V software ready :D

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So sad, dont people have a better way to spend their time?

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Why is that sad? I've hung around various corners of the VX scene... a large majority of the time peaple give credit where credit is due, articles and some posts are always great & sometimes funny, everyone I've talked to was nice and had some similiar views that I have.

Agian, why is this sad when in comparison to a large majority of people that don't particularly enjoy their life... and the only "hobby" they have is watching re-runs on TV, eating things they don't really enjoy for dinner, then going to sleep just to go to work the next day and do this routine over & over & over agian... intil they grow old and die knowing that they've never actually done anything.

Spyder32: you say if people weren't so ignorant they wouldn't have so many messes to clean up. I believe if they weren't so ignorant they begin to realize the mess they were in and then they would have a problem as long as they don't know it's there in their eyes everythings fine.

"Out of sight, out of mind"

Netsky and Sasser caused my customers loads of problems, but made me loads of money :D

At present 80% or the repairs coming into my workshop are Virii related. And at an average repair bill of €110.00 inc VAT I like to think it's worth my time.

Once a system has been cleaned by my team we update and educate. I would only get maybe 1 per month back as a re-repair.

I do not think that writing virii should be seen as them been hero's but as them wasting a good talent and the chance to make serious money working for "the man"

There again, if there were no infections, I would not have as many repairs :cool:

ROMAX