Fergie's Tech Blog

Kaspersky: Virus Writers at War

The confrontation between virus writers and the anti-virus industry is escalating, with malware authors also going after fellow VXers.

The dog eat dog atmosphere has resulted in cybercriminals stepping up their attacks against the security industry and government organisations, according to a report Kaspersky Labs published this week. The report, Malware Evolution 2005, Part II, puts the ramp up in the cyberhooligan activity down to greed. VXers are no longer satisfied with the profits to be made from infecting consumers, so they've stepped up their activity and adopted more aggressive tactics in a bid to increase the effectiveness of malware attacks.

According to Kaspersky, cybercriminals are tracking the activity of the anti-virus industry as closely as the anti-virus industry is tracking malware authors. For example, they use multi anti-virus scanners to test new modifications of existing malicious programs against vendors' anti-virus databases prior to their release.

posted by Fergie @ 4/05/2006 08:51:00 AM