On October 31st Mark Russinovich posted an entry on his blog entitled "Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far" that sparked a media frenzy. Russinovich discovered that Sony was using a rootkit as a method of control for some of their CDs. Sony got under much fire as both privacy advocates and the users were raging against such vile control actions and started boycotting certain Sony titles, bad reviews were starting to show up on shopping sites and Amazon.com contacted their customers and offered them a complete refund if they returned the "infected" CDs. At least now the public is much more aware of certain problems.

F-Secure made an interesting t-shirt that shows just how much Sony is "concerned" about their customers.

Assorted malware

Not surprisingly this year had thousands of pages filled with reports of various types of malware wrecking havoc. So, are things getting any better or just worse when it comes to virus outbreaks? "It seems better. In 2003 we had tons of large outbreaks. In 2004 we saw some. This year only a handful." says Mikko H. Hyppönen. "However, the transformation from hobbyist virus writers to professionals also means more targeted attacks. These stay under the radar and don't become front page news - the criminals don't want to end up on the front page. We're seeing less outbreaks - so the situation seems to be getting better. It's actually getting worse." he adds.

The most talked about virus of 2005 is certainly Sober which caused a lot of problems and disrupted e-mail traffic for both MSN and Hotmail. F-Secure cracked the code and learned how Sober activates. More than 20 variants of the virus have been found since October.


Other "popular" viruses in 2005 were Zafi.D and several variants of Zotob. When it comes to numbers, Hyppönen says the situation seems better: "All of these cases were smaller than cases like the Mydoom/Bagle/Netsky war or the Sasser outbreak from 2004."

Is there any hope in sight for 2006? "We're afraid of several things. Automatic mobile phone viruses. WLAN viruses. Skype viruses. I'm afraid it's not going to get better." according to Hyppönen.

Ciscogate

A lot of media attention was on the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas this year. Michael Lynn, a researcher working for ISS, did a presentation on a security hole in Cisco's IOS. Since Cisco threatened to shut down the conference Lynn first resigned from his position at Internet Security Systems but wouldn't back down from the presentation. What was a sad example of bad PR is everything that Cisco did. They instructed the people behind the conference to get the promotional material and rip out the pages containing the slides of Lynn's presentation. So 1984 of them.