Nuclear weapons aren't necessary...

Friend pointed me to the cartoon, about why countries in the world (in this case, China) no longer need nuclear weapons. Awesome!

Dramatic Increase in the number of malware variants...

Reading some of the details in Panda Labs' Annual Report for 2009 and came across these statistics...the math is pretty crazy...

Panda says that they have 40 million variants of malware in their database, collected over 20 years of business.
They indicate that they are collecting 55,000 variants a day.
If you do the math, that means that in the past 365 days, they collected 20 million variants.

So in one year, they collected as many variants of malware, as they have collected in the entire span of their business.

Neato.  Somebody has been busy.

chalmer

Panda Labs reports (pt 1)...banking malware

Was skimming through some interesting reports by Panda Labs. One report (pdf) covers some basic information on banking malware (i.e. malware designed to gather your personal information associated with online banking). The Appendix is particularly interesting. They cover some details on the Zeus Trojan kit. None of the details are new, nor is the combination of them new - still - I found it fun. And available for the low, low price of only $700. For example:

The Trojan runs on the affected user's computer and can carry out the following actions:

• Socket and Proxy server.
• Auto update.
• Using the polymorphic encrypter to generate different copies of itself.
• Capturing certificates.
• Changing local DNS.
• Removing cookies to get the user to re-enter the passwords.
• Capturing screenshots of the affected computers.
• Receiving remote control commands.
• Adding additional fields to a website and monitor the data sent.
• Stealing passwords stored in several programs (Protected Storage data…) and pop3 and ftp passwords, regardless of the port.

Very cool.

chalmer