The late 80s up to the early 90s dawned the age of DOS Viruses. We encountered different types of this DOS Viruses such as boot infectors, program infectors both memory residents and non-memory residents, stealth viruses also emerged from this era, the famous hooking of different INT or interrupts to achieve its intentions. An integration of both boot and program infectors surfaced as well multi-partite viruses were seen during this age these are just a few of the many viruses that plagued those days, the “DOS Days”.
The mid 90s paved its way to new technologies, making malware authors think of new ways of “utilizing” these technologies. Win32 infectors were born. Infecting new types of files that came with this new technology, new applications were also developed to adapt to new operating systems but new malwares also joined the advancement. With these advancements rootkits were made, these are programs that hide their intentions from users. On 1999 a new Age was born, the Age of Mass Mailers. These are programs that are capable of spreading itself through emails.
With the turn of the millennium, new threats are just lurking behind waiting to be found. With each new discovery new trends for these threats are to be established. With more and more activities are done online and more and more people rely on computers for their everyday affairs as information are becomes more and more critical to enterprises hackers, Malware authors and other malicious users tries to takes advantage of this. During the past few months, a rise in applications that “steals” information from users can be seen. It seems malware authors focused their attentions in developing applications wherein they can “profit” and no longer play for sheer “love of the game” as a decline of ordinary infectors, Trojans or Mass Mailers have been observed.
Backdoors are steadily growing as more and more important and “profitable” information can be found in a user”s computer, as “crimewares” also have increased in number of discoveries:
Both timely and proactive solutions should be done to combat these threats; we need to focus more on them in order to protect our clients and their information.
Rootkits should be centered also as they are a great threat because of they”re stealth, a great increase in malwares that employ this stealth technique can be seen in the data below which makes it quite frightening to know that you may not be able to determine if there is already a malware hiding inside your system.
Through the years malwares discovered just keeps on increasing in a very fast rate. As shown in the image below, it is projected thatmalwares discovered by 2006 will reach staggering high of 170,000. This just shows that we need to keep our heads up always.
With attacks coming from all directions, we need to know what we”re up against and with this in mind we must keep on practicing proactive approach in discoveringmalwares, protecting our clients is our main concern and as this year is already ending we mustn”t let our guards down. We must always keep the world safe for exchanging digital information.