June 13, 2005

Worms/trojans/viruses flooding internet

by brian_turner

Creators of worms and trojans are now launching them with increasing frequency. New variants of the Mytob virus, have appeared as often as every hour and some viruses appear in hundreds of different forms.

The variants are now appearing too quickly for security companies to analyse them and update their scanners to identify the malicious code in emails.

Mytob variants now fill 14 of the 20 places on a list of the Top 20 threats, compiled by security firm Sophos.

According to James Kay, chief technology officer at Blackspider, the rapidly increasing number of virus variants highlights the dangers of relying solely on e-mail scanners to catch viruses.

Research by Andreas Marx of the Institute of Technical and Business Information Systems at the Otto-von-Guericke University in Magdeburg, suggests that if anti-virus companies could produce patches within three hours of the first appearance of a virus, outbreaks would by almost eliminated.

Mr Marxs found that response times from anti-virus companies are improving but it still takes an average of 10 hours to update scanners and produce patches for new viruses.

Security firm Checkbridge, scanned 2 million e-mails, sent over five days, with three e-mail scanners – the scanning programmes sometimes missed over 33% of viruses. None of the tested programs caught all the viruses. On the best day, the most efficient scanner caught 97% of the malicious programs in the body of messages.

John Turley, founder of Checkbridge, highlighted the importance of programs that use general rules, called heuristics, to spot unknown variants that resemble known viruses.

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