No Creativity for Malware Authors, says Kaspersky Report

The latest quarterly report from Kaspersky Lab on IT security threats concludes that a creativity crisis continues to afflict malware writers. New ideas are lacking as are fundamentally new types of threats.

The report, which is based on the events occurring during the first six months of 2007, explains the source of the threats is from social engineering to the increasing use of various vulnerabilities to break into the system.

The present phase is conspicuous by a glaring absence of any serious new threats and a sharp incline in the commercialization of the virus-writing environment. In the opinion of Alexander Gostey, Senior Virus Analyst, Kaspersky Lab, it is the turn of anti-virus firms to make their move with the anti-virus companies gaining the upper hand - first time in several years, as reported by Kaspersky on August 7, 2007.

The sole concern of virus writers is to earn dirty money and they lack the ability to generate new ideas. So instead of it, they are attempting to squeeze all they can from old technologies while the anti-virus industry is coping pretty well. The biggest problem in the current scenario is the precedence of quantity over quality. The growth of the unceasing attack of ancient malicious programs stealing indiscriminately continues but the comparison is more appropriate to a battle of rock'em sock'em robots than to one of wits.

At the same time, there is a shift of cyber criminals to assembly-line production of malware, where the firm feels that existing trojans are merely repackaged to get past security software. David Emm, senior technology consultant at Kaspersky, declares that there is only a dependence of virus writers on tried and tested techniques due to the fact that they work. The path of least resistance is being resorted to, according to a statement in PC PRO on August 8, 2007.

Nevertheless, the company cautions that there is an increasing tendency of malware writers diverting focus to mobile devices. Alexander Gostev, Senior Virus Analyst at Kaspersky Labs, points out the detection of the first SMS Trojan for Symbian in the last quarter, indicating the Trojan sending text messages to fee-based numbers, reported in PC PRO on August 8, 2007. In Gostev's belief, it is the iPhone that will be singled out.

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» SPAMfighter News - 8/27/2007