Security Response

…they just move to new mediums. Waaaay back in 1994, a computervirus hoax known as Good Times was passed around the Internet. Whilenot the first computer virus hoax, it is probably one of the bestknown. Since then there have been many similar hoaxes all promisingcertain destruction of your computer if you open an email originatingfrom a certain address or simply by reading certain words that appearon your monitor. Naturally, when many people receive one of thesehoaxes they decide to forward the message to all their friends andfamily to save them from this fate, thus helping the chain letter tospread (if I tell two friends and they tell two friends…).

In recent years, I noticed that these messages were showing up in myinbox less and less frequently. Did people learn not to believe thesemessages? Well, apparently not. They seem to be making a comeback, butrather than being sent via email they’re now sent through the messagingsystems on various social networking sites, as well...

In a military operation, a beachhead is a point where an attacking force landing by sea reaches a beach and defends it until reinforcements arrive. At this point, the reinforcements will expand the attack. What can this possibly have to do with malicious code? In the last six months, we’ve seen a large shift towards multistage attacks as described in Volume XII of the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report. The first stage of a typical multistage malicious code attack consists of a small and quiet initial downloader Trojan being installed on a computer. This initial stage may disable security applications on the computer, then download other malicious code as part of a secondary stage attack (expanding the beachhead).

Of great concern is that the secondary stages usually allow the attackers to perform a wider variety of attacks against the user. The later stages are often back...