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Story URL: http://software.silicon.com/malware/0,3800003100,39123257,00.htm

Spammers and hackers in 'smart' virus attacks
Chatroom monitoring reveals profit is the motive…

By Reuters

Published: Wednesday 18 August 2004

Computer viruses spread by email are growing more sophisticated as virus writers and spammers join forces to make smarter bugs, according to security experts.

MessageLabs, which scans client emails to block viruses, said it picked apart some 5.6 billion emails from January to June this year and found one in 12 contained some sort of virus that penetrated firewalls meant to block them.

MessageLabs typically scans about 50 million customer emails daily, and its customers include major government and corporate entities from the UK government to the Bank Of New York and Japanese technology giant Fujitsu.

While the number of emails sent globally was not covered by the study, the problem of computer viruses is massive.

In August last year, the MSBlast worm spread rapidly around the world, infecting some 230,000 to 300,000 computers, based on estimates from sources ranging from Symantec to Kaspersky Labs.

Soon after, a worm called Sobig.F raced around the globe crashing email networks. At that time, AOL said it blocked 23.2 million copies of Sobig.F, and MessageLabs said about one in 17 emails were infected by the virus.

A separate MessageLabs study in the first six months of 2003 showed that one in 208 emails contained a virus, up from one in 392 for the first six months of 2002.

MessageLabs said it believes the biggest email security threat during the first half of 2004 was closer cooperation between virus writers and spammers.

The reason the two groups are getting together is profit, according to MessageLabs which has been monitoring chat rooms to infiltrate the secretive world of virus writers and spammers.

With the recent proliferation of software blocking spam, the spammers are paying virus writers to create viruses that attach to their emails and circumvent the spam blockers.

MessageLabs said its employees who monitor chat rooms have learned that virus writers and spam writers are increasingly exchanging messages about joining ranks.

"There is little or no monetary profit to be gained from simply distributing viruses, but when you combine the capabilities of a virus and the profit that can be earned from spam, suddenly you have an altogether more materialistic proposition," MessageLabs said in its report.

MessageLabs said its belief about the increasing cooperation was based both on its research through its clients and on industry research.