Steevo said:
We could hire some hitmen
we could restart the cold war
in this corner we have our hired thugs (ex SAS, Delta) and in that corner they'd have their ex Spetsnaz, URNA, ect.
Danseglio said malicious hackers are conducting targeted attacks that are "stealthy and effective" and warned that the for-profit motive is much more serious than even the destructive network worms of the past. "In 2006, the attackers want to pay the rent. They don't want to write a worm that destroys your hardware. They want to assimilate your computers and use them to make money.
"At Microsoft, we are fielding 2,000 attacks per hour".
its not kiddie hour any more when your talking the effective stuff
its organized crime, and generally from the former Soviet Block where there is alot of unemployed talent
(though China, Pakistan, India ect have a share as well)
the WMF "zero day" exploit was actually being shopped around from Moscow for at least a month
before any security firms got wind of it, use something like that to insert a kernal mode rootkit and mask the traffic with port knocking and you can have a wicked lurker in a sensitive "secured" database
what is suprising about this story is the fact Microsoft is on record as saying it is easier and better to Nuke an infection and that re-imaging back to a known good install is also by implication a preventative security option in the event your subverted and didn't know.
Specifically they are talking about enterprise but its just as applicable to enthusiasts, not that they are going to make alot of money off your p0rn collection and MP3's.
But they are happy to borg & bot you so you can help them do the same to others and extort money out of some poor slob as a protection racket or they close them down with a distributed denial of service (DDoS)
Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is "human stupidity."
In February alone, the company's free Malicious Software Removal Tool detected a social engineering worm called Win32/Alcan on more than 250,000 unique machines.
