Word: sobig
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...you’re a victim of social engineering—a tactic used by the latest viruses to trick you into downloading an attachment. Socially-engineered viruses aren’t new, but their recent rise in sophistication is. Viruses like Sobig, Mydoom, Netsky and Bagle “spoof” (or fake) sender addresses, create believable e-mail texts and give their attachments harmless names, all in an effort to convince you to download and run their harmful payloads. Bagle.J, for instance, sent a message to Harvard students from what appeared to be “Harvard.edu...
...said for vulnerabilities to the computers we depend on. Families must guard their computers against novice vandals planting viruses or against more advanced intruders leeching your computing power to launch a cyberattack on someone else. Despite the spate of devastating viruses this year--Slammer in January, Blaster and Sobig in August--the threat has evolved past the 17-year-old hacker, past the lone thief who steals and reveals credit-card data. Businesses must now watch for organized-crime groups adept at lifting valuable, private information and extorting money with it. The Federal Government and key industries must keep aspiring...
...Internet browsers. Microsoft earned its market share, but with that dominance comes the vulnerability of what computer geeks call monoculture. The near monopoly undermines security by making everyone's computers susceptible to the same flaws (you need only note the $2 billion in losses caused by the Sobig worm to understand). Critics point to parallels in the natural world to explain what happens when life becomes too dependent on a single source. "The Irish potato famine killed a country. The boll weevil killed an economy," Geer said. "It is self-evident that the desktops of the world are clones ripe...
...million Amount set aside by Microsoft to reward people who inform on hackers. The company is offering a $250,000 bounty on those responsible for the Sobig and Blaster computer viruses...
Around the same time as SoBig struck, feds descended on the teenage author of another virus like Elliot Nesses for the Matrix age, and one righteous New York Times letter-writer went so far as to compare that young coder to a fanatical terrorist. The creators of SoBig remain at large, and may well strike again, but one thing is certain: whoever they are, they are most likely neither Al Capone nor Muammar el-Qaddafi. Everyone whimpering about the destruction SoBig has caused should take a deep breath and learn to enjoy a little chaos...