Remember when a virus would sit quietly on your computer for months, and then, on a special day, perhaps Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday, wipe out your hard drive?
Those were the good old days.
Today’s malicious hackers are interested in cash, not pranks. There’s no profit in wiping out your hard drive when they can steal your credit card numbers and use your computer for Denial of Service attacks.
But who says profitable work can’t be pleasurable? Indeed, good managers know that a happy worker is a productive worker. And so, in the spirit of keeping employee morale high in the Russian Mafia, here are a few ideas for more entertaining malware:
- Conflicted.worm: Spreads by searching the Internet for vulnerable computers. Once infected, a PC feels even more vulnerable. Soon it’s out-and-out insecure and will do anything for a compliment, including help undermine another computer’s sense of security. Soon there will be millions of infected, insecure, and borderline depressed computers.
- Trojan.sub.prime: Spread through home-loan spam, this malicious program loans you RAM from other infected computers, then charges interest by grabbing some of your hard drive space. The scam can go on indefinitely—provided everyone has an unlimited amount of RAM and hard drive space. Otherwise, it will take down the Internet.
- Backdoor.porch: Visit a compromised Web site, and this spyware will create a backdoor to your computer, providing access to unwanted flies, nosy neighbors, and stray cats. Security experts are uncertain of what the creators of Backdoor.porch will eventually do with the infected PCs, but with summer fast approaching, there are great concerns of a barbeque.
- Trojan.HackTool.Worm.Won’t.Someone.Give.It.A.Name.gQtzw.NotaVirus: Symantec, McAffee, TrendMicro, and Kaspersky have not settled on a name for this recently-discovered malware, nor can they agree on how it spreads, what it does, or its signature. It appears to be intended to confuse security companies.
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