A thief in your PC

A software program enters a computer uninvited and unannounced, to spy on the web-surfing habits of the user and download email contacts. Another program hijacks a mobile phone to dial fee-based mobile services, the phone owner oblivious to what’s going on-until the bill comes in. yet another invades a home computer and uses it as a tool to steal something from a company’s database on the other side of the world.

Now, they’re coming without warning. Malicious turns 25 this year- has quietly changed in its origins, character and intent. The first computer virus, written by a high-school student in the US in 1982, simply copied itself and unleashed poetry on its target computers. Similarly, virtually all the early computer viruses during the 1980s were the creation of enthusiastic hackers whose primary intention was thrill-seeking rather that doing serious harm or earning wealth. But computer security specialists warn that computer viruses, worms, and Trojan horses- each with different tasks but all classified as malicious software, or mal ware-have become insidious and acquired new roles.  “We’re already starting to see a switch toward much more stealthy mal ware,” says Richard Ford, research professor in computer sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology in the US.

                                     “The threats (form insidious mal ware) are a reality, not just a possibility. Those who trying to use mal ware for financial in staying under the radar,”

                                                             Underground Economy

 In a perspective paper published in the US journal science last week, Ford and co-author Eugene Spafford, professor of computer science at Purdue University, have warned that the development of malware has become a supports an underground economy.

“If the viruses and worms of the past decade were the online equivalent of graffiti artists malware is now like criminals who wish to steal your wallet and forge your checks,” they wrote.

                   “Much of the mal wart today is designed to may facilitate financial gain for someone, somewhere,” says Sanjay Katkar, the chief technology officer of Quick Heal, an Indian company involved in developing anti-mal ware technology, mainly for homes and small and medium enterprises. “The nature of mal ware attacks is also changing.”

                Earlier there were mass attacks with a virus spreading across the continents. The last time this was expected to happen was in February 2006 when a virus named Kamasutra has threatened to disrupt computers. But it was detected several days ahead of its attack date, and a major outbreak was averted.

“ However, the malware of today  is increasingly silent, difficult to trace, and often picks on selected target computers,” says Katkar.

 Some security  researchers believe that data theft is a major emerging threat. “The data theft threat is real. The bad guys are learning fast, they are investing and building attack tools,” Cesar Cerrudo,the founder and CEO of Argeniss Information Security, a Buenos Aires-based company, and his colleague Esteban Martinez Fayo warned in a paper presented in March this year at a computer security conference in Amsterdam.

    “Data about people have more value than people think” Cerrudo and Fayo wrote in their paper. For instance, there might be organizations or individuals willing to pay for the addresses, mobile phone numbers, education details, and any other information that might be stored in a database.

MALWARE   MENACE

Virus:  A program designed to enter a computer to achieve a specific task- perhaps just introduce a harmless message or delete files or even reformat the hard disk.

Worm: A program designed to merely replicate and spread to other computers. A worm-virus hybrid may be used to deliver a virus. Such a hybrid would look at all email addresses in a computer and deliver the virus to those computers

Types of attacks

According to information security experts, it is no longer as difficult to write malware today as it would have been a few years ago. “There are now special tools available on the Internet for developing malware with a lot less effort than it would have taken in the late 1990s,” says Jagannath Patnaik, vice-president of sales at QuickHeal.

       A computer user may not even be aware when he or she becomes the target of malware.