12/29/2022 0 Comments Review antivirus zapZipping also changes the unique signature on the virus attachment, making it harder for antivirus engines to detect the malicious program, he said.Įighty percent of the Mydoom samples that were submitted to Cloudmark from its SpamNet network of 800,000 users had ZIP attachments, Prakash said. of San Francisco.įor mass mailing worms like Mydoom, zipping the virus payload makes it smaller and enables the worm to mail out more copies of itself in the same length of time than it could with uncompressed SCR, PIF or EXE files, Prakash said. The files have other advantages for virus authors, as well, said Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist at antispam company Cloudmark Inc. "For the most part, ZIPs are effective ways to send files, so blocking them is not something you want to do because it will break other functionality," said Craig Schmugar, antivirus research manager at Network Associates Inc.'s (NAI's) McAfee antivirus unit. That makes it difficult for companies to strip them out of e-mail messages without affecting employees' work, experts say. Unlike SCRs and PIFs, which have no use in legitimate exchanges, ZIP files are an important business tool that many individuals and organizations use to transfer large file. Virus writers noticed that and took advantage of it," he said. "When corporations started blocking EXE (executable) files to prevent viruses from coming into their environment, people who wanted to send EXEs back and forth started zipping them before they sent them. In switching to ZIPs, virus authors were also picking up on trends in legitimate e-mail traffic to hide their own malicious creations, Shipp said. agrees, saying that embedded support for ZIPs in modern systems makes them a rich target for worms like Mydoom. Gerhard Eschelbeck of security vulnerability scanning company Qualys Inc. Review antivirus zap software#While ZIP files were occasionally used to mask virus payloads, the practice wasn't common in virus writing circles because ZIPs, unlike SCR and PIF files, required separate software to be installed on the receiving system before the files could be opened and run on ubiquitous Windows machines, he said.Īll that changed with the release of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system, which included native support for opening ZIP files, allowing virus writers to count on users being able to unzip their attachment and open the virus file stored inside, Shipp said. Virus authors learned long ago to hide their creations in e-mail file attachments, often disguising viruses as Windows screen saver (SCR) files or Windows program information (PIF) files, said Mike Hrabik, chief technology officer of Solutionary Inc., a managed security services company in Omaha, Nebraska. As soon as one virus was successful with technology like this, other virus writers took notice." "We're definitely seeing a trend," said Alex Shipp, antivirus technology expert at MessageLabs Ltd. Review antivirus zap zip file#Long a staple of Internet and office communications, the compressed ZIP file has become embroiled in an arms race between virus writers and antivirus technology companies, experts say.
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