Ham
17th July, 2008, 02:37 PM
Worms are slower, but net's not safe yet
An unpatched PC running Windows XP will last on average between four and five minutes before it is attacked by a worm, according to the latest update from the Sans Institute - which says that the "window" during which a machine is safe to download the necessary software updates from Microsoft after, say, a system reinstallation "has shrunk over the past couple of years"
But in less discouraging news, researchers at McAfee's AvertLabs report that the exponential growth in the amount of unique malware such as worms and viruses has stopped - to be replaced by a much slower, linear growth.
"For years the security industry has been fighting an uphill battle, with the number of new samples increasing every month at an alarming rate," says Toralv Dirro, one of the anti-malware team. "Now with constant, though still massive, growth there is some light at the end of the tunnel. If this trend keeps up, planning for future resources and technologies will become much easier and more manageable."
However Thorsten Holz, one of the founders of the German Honeynet project (which aims to discover how prevalent malware is) reckons that survival times are much longer for an unprotected machines - ranging from 10 minutes to 20 days. Even so, he adds: "The time is still short and you need to patch a system before taking it online."
That might seem like a catch-22, but the principal attacks are from longstanding worms that attempt to connect to open ports on a machine.
The threat from existing malware to the millions of systems running Windows XP remains real, notes Lorna Hutcheson at the Sans Institute. "More than once, I've dealt with a compromise of a system that was placed on the network before it was hardened. I got the same answer every time 'We needed it working ASAP'."
That problem will not go away, even if the growth in the amount of malware trying to break into a machine is slowing down, as McAfee reports in so-far unpublished data.
It says: "The growth is no longer exponential but linear, averaging around 600,000 samples added each month. Looking at our own numbers of new samples, I can confirm this new linear growth," says Dirro - who cautions that it only applies to code that is uniquely identified as different from any preceding ones using a cryptographic hash. "Should we see more file-infecting viruses in the future, and there are some indications they will make a comeback, this way of counting will quickly become useless."
Charles Arthur
The Guardian, Thursday July 17, 2008
guardian.co.uk
? Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
An unpatched PC running Windows XP will last on average between four and five minutes before it is attacked by a worm, according to the latest update from the Sans Institute - which says that the "window" during which a machine is safe to download the necessary software updates from Microsoft after, say, a system reinstallation "has shrunk over the past couple of years"
But in less discouraging news, researchers at McAfee's AvertLabs report that the exponential growth in the amount of unique malware such as worms and viruses has stopped - to be replaced by a much slower, linear growth.
"For years the security industry has been fighting an uphill battle, with the number of new samples increasing every month at an alarming rate," says Toralv Dirro, one of the anti-malware team. "Now with constant, though still massive, growth there is some light at the end of the tunnel. If this trend keeps up, planning for future resources and technologies will become much easier and more manageable."
However Thorsten Holz, one of the founders of the German Honeynet project (which aims to discover how prevalent malware is) reckons that survival times are much longer for an unprotected machines - ranging from 10 minutes to 20 days. Even so, he adds: "The time is still short and you need to patch a system before taking it online."
That might seem like a catch-22, but the principal attacks are from longstanding worms that attempt to connect to open ports on a machine.
The threat from existing malware to the millions of systems running Windows XP remains real, notes Lorna Hutcheson at the Sans Institute. "More than once, I've dealt with a compromise of a system that was placed on the network before it was hardened. I got the same answer every time 'We needed it working ASAP'."
That problem will not go away, even if the growth in the amount of malware trying to break into a machine is slowing down, as McAfee reports in so-far unpublished data.
It says: "The growth is no longer exponential but linear, averaging around 600,000 samples added each month. Looking at our own numbers of new samples, I can confirm this new linear growth," says Dirro - who cautions that it only applies to code that is uniquely identified as different from any preceding ones using a cryptographic hash. "Should we see more file-infecting viruses in the future, and there are some indications they will make a comeback, this way of counting will quickly become useless."
Charles Arthur
The Guardian, Thursday July 17, 2008
guardian.co.uk
? Guardian News and Media Limited 2008