100,000+ Viruses in 2004

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According to BBC New "The count of known viruses broke the 100,000 barrier and the number of new viruses grew by more than 50%."

The BBC is reporting that there has been a 50% increase in the number of viruses released in 2004; as many as 100,000 viruses were seen 'in the wild', many of them doing serious damage to their targets. Bot-nets, computers infected with remote control software featured largely in 2004; equally prominent was the use of viruses and these bot-nets for cyber-crime and sending spam.

2004 also saw the release of the first proper virus for mobile phones. For PC's, in first place on the top ten viruses of 2004 was the Netsky worm variant, Netsky-P. The worm exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer and mailed itself to vulnerable Windows machines.

Read Full Article at BBC.com (Link)

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Actually the incidents of viruses in 2004 was exceedingly low. The nature of them calling them viruses, shows a lack of understanding of the threats on their part. Specifically, when they refer to the top threats of 2004:

TOP VIRUSES OF 2004
1) Netsky-P
2) Zafi-B
3) Sasser
4) Netsky-B
5) Netsky-D
6) Netsky-Z
7) MyDoom-A
8) Sober-I
9) Netsky-C
10) Bagle-AA

And there isn't a single virus among them... Trojans/Malware and Backdoors are the threat, and that comprised a bulk (99.8%) of all threats in 2004. I have personally analysed over 32,000 new threats in 2004 for several different AV companies.

The major reason Trojans/Malware/Backdoors are a big threat, is because they are quite easy to make, easy to modify, and easy to spread because so many people insist on using Internet Explorer. Firefox alone, negates a fairly substantial portion of threats out there.

It's been months since i've seen a real, true, ITW virus out there.

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Even if you use FireFox, you still have the whole IE framework on your machine and are just as prone to the mentioned worms and trojans and backdoors. Unless, of course, you have a magical way to remove all IE remnants from your Windoze ssystem, which, as far as I know, is close to impossible. If not, then simply highly improbable.

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RomanDA

Join Date 12/2003

+147

MALWARE is the real VIRUS these days..

I spent 5 days CLEANING a college students NEW PC (had it at college for 1 semister!).

First time I ran AD-Aware there was 3800 "Critical Objects". I ended up having to remove the drive from this pc, load it into another one, run AD-AWARE, NAV, SPY-BOT about 100 time to get rid of all of the CRAP that got loaded on this poor pc.

I know it would have been easier to just re-load the pc, but i wasnt going to let these MORONs win.

There needs to be more software designed to BLOCK these lame programs, the POPUP IE window is the worst thing that has EVER happen to the internet!

If you know of some malware blockers (ones that Actively search for, and stop these crappy programs) for XP, please let me know.

Spy-bot is good, and Ad-aware is good, but neither are perfect. Also, I would like to know of a good registry write monitoring/blocking program. I used the one from Spy-bot, but it still let things get it. Id love something that would completly LOCK my registry and let only ME decide what gets added or deleted.

Thanks all!

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