I’m seeing headlines on Ars Technica about a ’storm worm’ that uses current knowledge to lure its victims. Specifically, it will grab and use current news headlines and other such information to make itself appear legitimate.

Virus writers used to do things for fun and games. Much in the same manner as hackers, they would find ways to mess around with the operating system, open up its holes and take advantage of them. Sure, there was the part of convincing somebody into installing said worm, but you’d be surprised how almost everybody can do some social engineering without much prior knowledge of things. But now things are changing.

Organized crime has gotten a clue of how lucrative electronic markets really are, and they want a cut. For most tech-heads, all the malware on the web is a nuisance, something they are aware plagues the Internet at large [remember how much e-mail traffic is spam, for example.] but can be avoided and guarded against. But we must look beyond - there are people using scare tactics to infiltrate and steal from others. There are people building botnets to stage attacks, both for economic gain [DDoS-for-hire schemes] or political speech [Estonia's 'little' outage.] It doesn’t matter if I, myself [my computers and my information] am safer than the rest. Their weaknesses affect me in many ways [hey, guess what, VISA doesn't lose money when you use somebody else's CC. The merchant does. Then they jack our rates as a way to 'be able to guarantee financial security in the face of escalating threats to our personal information'] and so I feel I must do something, somehow. I blog and bitch and rant about it, I appear weird an annoying to my friends when I point out things of this nature and they probably brush me off as a lunatic for even mentioning something as unimportant as computer security.

I guess a small part of me would rejoice when one of them gets stung because of their disregard to some basic security principles. I’m sorry, you know, but remember: some lessons we have to learn on our own.

The other day I was chatting on how an intelligent worm/virus would be developed. Something that, left alone in the wild long enough, would learn to morph itself, change its signature, learn of new exploits and try to use them on various targets. A distributed being [a hydra, if you will] that acts independently and dynamically evolves as many traits as possible, always being able to share the knowledge between its clones. In a sense, an organism that could put our ‘evolution’ to shame.

I don’t know if I should be excited or not, but I get the feeling I might see something like this in my lifetime.