The History of Malware
The Modern Era of Malware
Obviously, there have been tremendous developments in both the sophistication of malware, and the defense mechanisms, such as antivirus software. Since 2001, there have been a number of interesting developments in malware. Virustlist.com provides a comprehensive summary of the challenges users faced each year:
2001
- Email and the Internet become a larger target for malware propagation
- ICQ, MSN Messenger and file-sharing networks also become big targets for viruses
- Fileless worms appear
- Worms for Windows make up the majority of new threats by mid-year, with macro- and script-viruses losing ground significantly
2002
- User awareness increased, such that there were very few prominent viruses
- However, there were simply many more viruses in the wild, rather than a few dominant viruses.
2003
- Worms were by far the greatest threat
- The internet worm "Slammer" utilized a vulnerability in MS SQL Server to spread. Slammer was a fileless worm, and is considered one of the biggest attacks in the history of the Internet. On January 25, 2003, in the span of just minutes, the worm infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide and increased network traffic 40-80%. National segements of the Internet crashed.
- The Lovesan worm utilized flaws in Windows 2000/XP and infected enormous numbers
- E-mail worms provided the greatest problem.