BreachBytes

In the end of 2007 we first noted the FastHosts breaches in the BreachBytes links to breach articles. On January 14, 2008, ComputerWorld reported that the seemingly benign and random breach(es) at FastHost - The UK’s largest hosting company - in late 2007 appear to be much worse than originally thought due to the damage that is now happening as a result. Here is the article:

New mass hack strikes sites, confounds researchers

It is interesting to see that the hackers continue to use more sophisticated methods to perform their damage and a variety of the knowledgeable security companies are quoted as not really knowing how to determine which sites were in fact infected.

According to Security Focus, F-Secure and McAfee are reporting that almost twice as many malware variants were detected in 2007 than in 2006. F-Secure says they have detected 500,000 variants while McAfee estimates 360,000. It is not so much the number of variants that is of interest here but the rate at which they increased in the last year. The bottom line is that malware authors are wising up and creating dynamic binaries that are difficult for antivirus vendors to detect.

The rate of new malware variants is making signature creation more costly to the anti-virus vendors. McAfee’s Dave Marcus is quoted as saying “You have to invest in your researchers, but you also have to invest in automating the process.” This is good news for companies like Offensive Computing that are trying to do just this. The malware authors will keep getting smarter and therefore those of us on the other side of the fence have to step up and create innovative technologies to make their jobs harder.