Hackers’ Camp discusses Hardware & Security Hacking

Virus experts and researchers gathered at the Chaos Communication Camp on August 9, 2007 in Germany highlighted the current growth of 34% in trojans and viruses over the same period in 2006. They also discussed the development in the sophistication of malware attacks, and the growth in professional dealing with malware. The sponsor of Chaos Communication Camp is Chaos Computer Club, a hacker organization, which is very old and well known worldwide. The camp, which takes place once after every four years, discusses hardware and security hacking.

Hackers know they can make big money these days by breaking into people's computers. Now there are digital mafias to do this who have started to replace amateur work with professional coding.

Toralv Dirro, researcher with McAfee Avert Labs, said that recent months have seen the emergence of some technical trends. WIRED BLOG NETWORK published Dirro's statement on August 9, 2007. Private IRC servers in place of public ones are being increasingly used to control botnets. Very often these servers operate from a hacked computer, or from a PC openly available on hire. A number of Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) supply computers for hire while they care little for this process, Dirro said.

Botnets are also increasingly being controlled from peer-to-peer networks like eDonkey to exchange messages and update the networks from time to time. Dirro presented a screen shot of a botnet control system using simple forms that McAfee gained access to, only to illustrate that it is just as easy to use these systems as trying to corrupt the commercial software.

But things will work fine if anti-virus products are adequately placed, said researcher Sergio Alvarez. He showed debugging software that detected bugs in various kinds of anti-virus programs and said the problems were common everywhere in the industry.

A majority of anti-virus companies have tight deadlines so they rush out products missing out the very important process of debugging essential for such software, Alvarez commented. This exposes security software to attacks that exploit those bugs giving way to a self-contradictory situation for system administrators.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 8/24/2007