2003 sees hackers rise to the task, says NAI chief

The hacker and virus community has raised the bar for security companies this year - posing new and greater threats to end users both at home and at work.

In the past couple of months we have witnessed a spate of mass mailers and worms attacking vulnerabilities and finding their way back to the desktop - and this is a warning of things to come, according to Gene Hodges, president of Network Associates.

"Ten years ago we were talking about virus writers and hackers as being 14-year-old boys with no girlfriend. Now they are 24-year-old programmers with no girlfriend. But in that time they have become far more advanced in their attacks.

"Over the last year they have been inventing attacks which move at great speed," he said, referring in particular to the Slammer worm which brought almost immediate chaos to networks around the world within minutes of first being detected.

"These attacks are known as Warhol worms," said Hodges, "because they are famous for 15 minutes - but in that time they can spread around the world and cause a great deal of damage."

"The only problem with the 'Warhol worm' name was that it didn't take 15 minutes, it took just three for Slammer to spread."

Hodges believes the biggest challenge in the anti-virus industry now is intrusion prevention. To date it has been about intrusion detection. However, the problem now is that with detection it's all very well detecting something but, with the speed of attack being talked about with these Warhol worms, the damage is done "before you've even got out of bed an pulled your pants on", according to Hodges.

This concern was central to Network Associates' recent acquisition spree. The company recently bought host-based intrusion prevention firm Intercept and IntruVert, a network-based intrusion prevention firm.

"If you asked me what keeps me awake at night, then my top priority is these Warhol worms," he said.

However, a second major concern is the fear of the unknown.

"The concern is that an inventive hacker will come up with an attack which we just can't stop. But fortunately we are working incredibly hard to ensure that doesn't happen."