Technology: Professional Virus developers target P2P

Technology: Professional Virus developers target P2P. Professional development has finally come to virus development.  The growth path of SoBig and Blaster shows that there are smart developers driving their development cycles and not idle teenagers.  New research on this concurs and puts KaZaA in the crosshairs of the next big wave of attacks:

Hughes predicted that these so-called 'zero day' attacks–called that because of the ability of an exploit to appear before a vulnerability is even known, much less patched–will increase in 2004.

Other threats which will plague users in 2004, he predicted, will come from peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing software, and spyware, utilities for tracking Web usage that often piggyback on free-for-the-downloading software.  Hughes sees peer-to-peer software, such as KaZaA, as being particularly troublesome in 2004. After analyzing hundreds of the most popular files shared on KaZaA–including 'cracks' that allow users to break copy protection on commercial software–he discovered that 45 percent actually contained viruses, worms, or Trojan horses. [John Robb's Weblog]

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