The Wi-Fi explosion: a virus writer's dream

With the consumer Wi-Fi explosion, launching a virus into the wild has never been easier and more anonymous than it is today. Like a sneeze in a crowded subway, it's hard to find the human source of the latest viral infection. On the Internet it's not much different. The people who write these nasty little programs and release them into the wild almost never get caught. Why? The answer is easy, but it's also a sort of technical nemesis: there's simply no way to track these people down.

The current approach to catching virus writers isn't working. Code analysis and disassembly provides clues about the author, but it's not enough. Virus writers boast of their accomplishments in private bulletin boards, yet only the most vocal and arrogant few will get caught. Even with logs, IP addresses and private access, it's still near impossible to track them down.

Law enforcement agencies in every country are clearly ill-equipped to deal with the myriad of technical hurdles required to track virus authors down, and so they turn to a few elite security consultants, some working as threat analysts at the major A/V vendors for help. They can usually narrow down the source of a virus to having been released in a geographic part of the world, but the rest is a mere packet in the bitstream.

Read Full Story