Thursday, August 10, 2006

Defcon Speakers Team Up to Fight 'Queen Bots'

Imagine for a moment that our central defense against bank robbers was a technology that recognized criminals based largely upon their physical appearance. Now imagine that the bad guys had figured out a way to rapidly and automatically change not only their facial structure, but their height, weight, clothing and method of attack. The net result those attacks would ultimately be more successful and profitable bank robberies, encouraging the bad guys to step up the frequency and brazenness of their attacks.

That is a rough analogy for describing the dirty little secret of the anti-virus industry today -- that the authors of computer worms and viruses designed to turn regular computers into spam-spewing and data-stealing zombies or "bots" are increasingly outpacing the security vendors, by automatically updating the genetic makeup of their creations before anti-virus companies have time to ship updates to their detection files. As a result, we have an industry whose business is predicated on 10 to 20 percent of its customers being successfully attacked before it can even begin to respond, according to some estimates.

Read the entire article HERE.

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