By Nathan Weinberg

Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft's platform products and services division, told reseller magazineCRN that safety and security, improved user experience, and mobility features will be key additions in Vista. But there will be no anti-virus software, the Windows development supremo said during a questions and answers session with CRN. For unspecified business (not technical) reasons, Microsoft will sell anti-virus protection to consumers through its OneCare online backup and security service.

If Microsoft were to release a free antivirus product, it would likely spend years in court with federal and European courts, charged yet again as an evil monopoly.

Looked differently:

If Microsoft were to release a free antivirus product, it would likely protect

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 13:44

By IT World Canada Staff, ITWorldCanada

Two decades ago, Brain, the first boot sector virus that infected personal computers via the floppy disk, was detected. While Brain itself was relatively harmless, it marked the genesis of the world of computer viruses.

This year marks the 20th year of the existence of viruses after Brain was detected on January 19, 1986.

Boot sector viruses, now long extinct along with the floppy disk, held a relatively long reign from 1986 to 1995. Since transmission was via disk from computer to computer, infection would only reach a significant level months or even years after its release.

This changed in 1995 with the development of macro viruses, which exploited vulnerabilities in the early Windows operating systems. For four years, macro viruses reigned over the IT world and propagation times shrank to around a month from the moment the virus was found to when it became a global problem.

As e-mail became widespread, e-mail worms became the next menace, and some worms reached global epidemic levels in just one day. Most notable in this connection was one of the very first e-mail worms, Loveletter aka I LOVE YOU, which caused widespread havoc and financial loss in 1999 before it was brought under control.

In 2001, the transmission time window shrank from one day to one hour with the introduction of network worms (such as Blaster and Sasser), which automatically and indiscriminately infected every online computer without adequate protection. E-mail and network worms continue to cause havoc in the IT world.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 17:17

By Gameshout.com

A top 10 ranking rouge antispyware program employs malicious tricks to scam customers.

Anti-Spyware vendors are warning of a new technic to sway antivirus programs to sell more product. It's only natural for developers to want to find a niche or a catch to make their product sell more, however using malicious code, many would and should say, is just downright wrong. But such is the case with popular rouge anti-spyware program Razespyware, which installs spyware along with the program.

The program, along with itself, also installs a fake keylogger program (filename keylogger32.exe) so that the program will find it in a scan. The infected computer also transmits a signal to pills-catalog.net where a bot-net controller is running

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 17:12

By Gregg Keizer

The worm, which debuted Tuesday, is now No. 3 on F-Secure's updated virus list and accounted for more than 11% of all malicious code the company intercepted in the last 24 hours.

A worm that debuted Tuesday had quickly climbed the malware chart to the number three spot by Wednesday, a Finnish security company said.

With a variety of names -- F-Secure calls it VB.bi, Symantec dubs it Blackmal.e, McAfee labels it MyWife.d -- the worm, said Helsinki-based F-Secure, is a simple Visual Basic (VB) construction that arrives as an e-mail file attachment. The worm also spreads through shared folders, and when activated tries to disable a number of security programs, including those sold by Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, and Kaspersky Labs.

One of its distinguishing features, noted the Internet Storm Center (ISC) in its alert is that "the attachment can be either an executable file or a MIME file that contains an executable file."

The latter tactic is meant to conceal the payload's danger; the MIME format is rarely used by attackers. One of the last great MIME-based attacks was the Nimda worm of 2001.

Posted by Spencer Cuffe in Virus & AntiVirus News at 17:22