Spyware: Know Your Enemy White Paper

In order to better understand where spyware is going, or more importantly, where it’s evolved from, we actually need to wind the clock back a lot further than may be first imagined; in fact, over fifteen years. If we look at the embryonic stages of the anti-virus industry, around sixteen years ago there were the first boot-sector viruses. It has taken this time for viruses as we’ve traditionally known them to evolve towards the more commercially viable, or intellectual-property-theft status that we now associate with contemporary viruses, a fact not realized by many. This whitepaper goes in-depth to discuss the history of spyware and its evolving future.

 

So only in the last few years have viruses actually stopped being mainly malicious and become about commercial gain of some kind. This has only really started in earnest within the last four years, which is also quite compelling. We can pinpoint this transition back to the advent of the Sobig.A strain, in January 2003, the first virus that we could really say was all about commercial gain. Since then, much has happened, but we can also say that the profile of the person creating these viruses has changed profoundly. Only a few years prior to this were viruses such as Melissa or LoveBug in the year 2000. It was still largely individuals who were responsible and the goal was either malicious or to gain notoriety within those circles. With the advent of Sobig we see a wholly different type of person responsible – someone not motivated to write viruses or malware for malicious reasons, but motivated very much to create these weapons for commercial gain. Viruses continued to be developed further and refined throughout the remainder of 2003. In 2004 significant outbreaks caused disruption on a massive scale, as writers started to get to grips with the technology, where we witnessed events like Sobig.F and MyDoom.A, and the NetSky vs. Bagle ‘bot wars.’

 

All of these events played themselves out on a world stage and became major blips on the radar as huge numbers of “zombie” computers were being infected and subsequently harvested. Without a doubt they were actually too successful from the writers’ perspective – because they were too big as blips on the radar. The whole security community was very aware that these were in circulation, vendors were racing to issue patches, media sources were giving them more oxygen, and so the level of awareness in both corporates and home-users was high. People were responding quickly and updating their computers more rigorously than before.