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Community Issues
The Community Issues reports take a look into the forces acting for and against malware as a whole.
Disposable Victory: Dumping Infected PCs (PDF) July 2005 Based on stories of home Internet users that are replacing infected PCs instead of attempting to clean them, this report examines the issues surrounding the tactic of fighting spyware by ditching the compromised machine altogether.
Poison Ivy Farmers: Virus Collectors & Collections (PDF) May 2005 Danger is cool. Pet scorpions, rattlesnakes, and computer viruses fit the bill for different groups. This report looks at the hobbyist collector and the issues surrounding publicly available collections.
May I Help You: The Search Assistants (PDF) April 2005 Spyware and its somewhat more innocuous cousin, adware, frustrate computer users in every country. This report looks at the aggressive tactics these threats employ in their quest to "win" customers by any means necessary. Two well-known "application suites" are used as examples.
April 2005 The business of malware is examined in many reports across infectionvectors.com, this one takes a peek at the high-volume world of email/phony site cons - otherwise affectionately known as phishing. Examined via one popular tactic, a Trojan known as Blinder, this article briefly illustrates the breadth of email scams.
October 2004 infectionvectors.com writer on SecuityFocus with an Infocus article discussing what opportunities exist for security professionals when a virus hits the network.
October 2004 Sample presentations and papers promoting the use of virus awareness programs within organizations of all sizes.
Automatic Startup for Windows-based Viruses PDF July 2004 Throughout the articles on infection vectors and elsewhere, there are quite a few references to "automatic startup" routines that viruses employ to ensure they load with the operating system. This review of the common ways to accomplish this within Microsoft Windows products provides not only a glimpse of virus writing tactics, but also a starting point for checking a machine for infection in the absence of anti virus software/signature updates.
Much different from "secure coding" many viruses are packaged in ways that make it impossible for non-professionals to examine what they try to accomplish. Even many pros are slowed down by the encryption and compression tricks coders employ. The super virus of the future may simply be a worm that cannot be disassembled, not one with a radical new infection routine. This short paper takes a look at what coders do and why they do them.
Is there any hope for restitution from a virus coder? With the growing number of high-profile arrests in 2004, maybe we'll find out.
When an automated virus (worm) breaks into a number of machines and wreaks havoc, what price should the virus author pay? With the growing number of arrests this year, that question will probably be asked quite a bit. This article looks at a few viruses and alleged authors, and asks whether there is any liability for virus writers beyond the code they compile and/or actively distribute?
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