One would think that if you were planning on creating a piece of malware the last thing you would do is to send it to Microsoft – right?
Well it turns out that this is something that does happen and apparently with some regularity. It happens when the hacker’s system crashes because as with all Windows crashes the user is prompted to send Microsoft a crash report – which these geniuses do. The thing is these crash reports often contain the malicious code that caused the crash.
As Rocky Heckman, a Microsoft senior security architect, told Josh Taylor from ZDNet Australia:
“People have sent us their virus code when they’re trying to develop their virus and they keep crashing their systems,” Heckman said. “It’s amazing how much stuff we get.”
Another interesting tidbit that came out of the blog post was the number of attacks that the Microsoft.com site undergoes each day:
According to Heckman, based on the number of attacks on Microsoft’s website, the company was only too familiar with what types of attacks were most popular.
“The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com,” he said. “On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second at Microsoft.com,” said the senior security architect.
“I think overall we’ve done pretty good, even when MafiaBoy took down half the internet, you know, Amazon and eBay and that, we didn’t go down, we were still up.”
Wow, 7000 times per second. Damn.
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It would be thought to be unlikely that Microsoft would not notice something like this happening and address the author of the malware. One of the many reasons I switched from Windows to Linux is the fact that it is so resistant to malicious codes, although nothing is unbreakable this is sure a lot less breakable that a Windows computer.
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LikeIt would be thought to be unlikely that Microsoft would not notice something like this happening and address the author of the malware. One of the many reasons I switched from Windows to Linux is the fact that it is so resistant to malicious codes, although nothing is unbreakable this is sure a lot less breakable that a Windows computer.
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- disagree
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Likeonly a nerd on a bad day
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- offensive
- disagree
- off topic
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