Clever infection techniques top e-threats list

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 19:26

Business IT - Security

According to BitDefender, once such an infected file is executed directly, or the drive it resides in gets opened with the "Autorun" option enabled, the virus installs a rootkit onto the affected computer.

The rootkit gives an attacker complete control, while the virus itself, “oddly, acts as a port-scanner, trying to find open UDP services on random computers,” warns BitDefender.  Dangerous, indeed!

Finally, in seventh place on the top 10 e-threats detected in May, BitDefender reveals that the Storm Worm is back from the e-dead, “this time as a dropped component.”

“In layman’s terms,” explains BitDefender, "it is not spreading on its own, but rather it is being installed by some other e-threat, presumably to be used as a ‘remote control’ for the infected computer.”