Recent studies are showing that having merely traditional Anti-Virus Programs Installed onto a computer is proving to be highly ineffective with today’s code morphing malware. The complexity and uncanny ability of these malware to change signatures defeats most if not all intrusion prevention systems. Hackers have also capitalized on the fact that users trust content that is seemingly from legitimate sources like the recent incident with a Goggle Mail application which is used to archive email from the email company’s servers which incorporated information gathering code. The problem was only found when a programmer unknowingly de-compiled the program and found an email address along with a log-in password to the program author’s mailbox. Upon using the derived information to get into the email account, he found several user information along with usernames and passwords of others who have used the program. He took drastic steps and deleted all information (email) he found not to be the author’s and informed the company which released the program about the incident. The developer simply said an error checking routine or some draft code was arbitrarily left within the released version. They promise not to do so in the upcoming versions of the said archiving program…. Yeah Right.
People have been warned again and again regarding the risk of getting free software and other free stuff that seemingly comes from legitimate sources (not the developer’s page) for they may have embedded payload which they unload once installed. Current Trojans also use swift actions to copy itself onto all peripherals(flash disk, digital camera, digital media players, PDA’s and other similar devices which can hide the code) attached to the system it infected so even a complete Operating System reinstall would only result in reinstallation if re connected to the same system. Other malware simply use the email addresses within certain programs like outlook and messenger sending out copies of itself to all those listed and infecting further computers as it travels all over the world.
The scenario has come to the point experts are talking about implementing a white list of sorts of all valid applications, sources for all legal and safe systems which are to be allowed access to their systems. This would have a sort of inventory program which keeps track from online sources of trusted sites and sources of files and rejecting those which are not included. Manual inclusion would be the Achilles’ heel of such an audit system for any wrong addition would again make it vulnerable to attack.