How Can We Turn This Energy Into Something Useful?
by Paul McGoldrick
The first technology story that I read this morning was about the latest
version of the virus NetSky, version .R, the second this week. All-in-all
in March there have been fifteen versions of the virus thrown at us innocent
users, including two different versions let loose in one day. The diatribe
between the writer of the NetSky virus and the competing Bagle virus also
seems to be heating up.
The benign author of NetSky claims that his raison d'être is to rid the world of Bagle and, indeed, one of the things his program does is trash a whole bunch of other viruses like Bagle, SoBig and MyDoom (which is up to version .V -- that's the letter not the Roman Numeral) if it finds them on the computer it is about to infect. So, apart from being a good guy, helping out IT departments everywhere, NetSky also hijacks e-mail addresses, of course so it can grow.
The NetSky author also likes to be a little smutty in slightly dodgey English. "Yes, true, you have understand it. Bagle is a ****** guy." "NetSky…a good software. Good guys behind it." And he goes on to promise that NetSky will be around as long Bagle is still around. "We will release thousands of our Skynet versions…" The twist of the name to Skynet is very interesting and conjures up a lot of other things; there is Loral Skynet; an Irish airline that specializes in Far East connections through Moscow, an electronics company that makes power factor correctors; there's even a worldwide express freight company. Any connections to any of those? The Moscow one might explain the English…
Malware proliferation (what a mouthful) has now caused over $100 billion in economic damage according to the prestigious, London-based, security company mi2g Limited, just from MyDoom, NetSky and Bagle.
But despite its claims to be the good guy NetSky dominates in the virus "hit" parade for March 2004. According to anti-virus/anti-spam company Sophos, NetSky dominated the top three positions with NetSky.D taking 30.2% in first place and a close run second and third place for NetSky.B with 12.3% and NetSky.C with 11.7%.
Although NetSky dominates, mi2g has also tracked similarities between the malwares of MyDoom and Bagle with the strong suggestion that both may be coming from the same source(s).
So, what's in it for these obviously brilliant people who spend their lives, it seems, creating more and more sophisticated malwares? This latest version of NetSky with the subject of "Document" followed by a number is even making that number random, a very sophisticated piece of programming in something that is being spread around. Is there some way that we could get these people to do something useful for society with the wonderful talents they obviously have?
I think it may be deeper than some of us thought -- or maybe I've just been slow on the uptake on this one. These recent viruses aren't rated by the security firms as very high risks for users -- they're just a pain -- but there has to be a purpose behind them. In an interview this week on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart a spammer (who describes himself as a "large volume e-mail distributor") posed that people loved getting his mail, that pressure for legislation against "large volume e-mail" came from the US Postal Service which he was putting out of business by not buying stamps.
Some of us probably feel that the USPS has been on a downward spiral of self-destruction for a number of years but most of us don't see "large volume e-mail" as a major reason. But the fact that spamming pays the spammer (the spammer Rob Corddry interviewed didn't deny making 10s of thousands of dollars a day) creates an urgent commercial reason to expand the e-mail address lists that are available. Surely that's where the likes of NetSky come in: when the author complains of Bagle creating backdoors in PCs doesn't it sound rather like he is complaining that Bagle got to a computer, and an e-mail address book, before he did?
No, we're not going to be able to re-direct these people's talents; they're
obviously on an income bonanza they cannot afford to get off.