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Virus Update: Will the "Fileless" Worm be a Problem in 2002?
Friday, February 01, 2002
ComputerWire News

Adequate safeguards against so-called "fileless" worms will stand as a call to arms for the anti-virus system administrator during 2002, according to Kaspersky Labs.

The Moscow, Russia-based anti-virus company released that while 2001 was dominated by viruses designed to exploit the flaws in Microsoft's notoriously vulnerable operating system code, 2002 will see a new trend towards more sophisticated viruses that will be much tougher to detect.

Kaspersky's fears for the future stem from the emergence last year of the CodeRed worm, a fileless program that resided in system memory only, hopping to new hosts in the form of special data packets that are all but invisible to conventional anti-virus scanners and monitors. CodeRed worm is estimated to have infected over 300,000 computers last year, illustrating the real danger posed by fileless attacks.

2001 also saw the increased appearance of malicious programs targeted at the Linux operating system. The first sign of this was the Ramen network worm that struck at a large number of corporate networks. It also became clear during the year that there are vulnerabilities inherent in many Internet paging systems such as ICQ and Instant Messenger, which were a target for a string of viruses. Notably Gnutella, the information-exchange network, fell victim to the network worm Mandragore.
(OptOnline.net News Source)
2002 © ComputerWire.

Dan