Old Malware Threats Re-Emerge
Dark Reading discusses re-emerging malware with Gunter Ollmann, director of security strategy for IBM ISS and finds:
The bigger problem, Ollmann says, is that many major antivirus and IDS/IPS vendors that rely mainly on signature-based protection typically retire signatures for older threats such as Slammer because they have to pare down their bulging signature load to preserve performance.
Keeping up defenses against older, known threats is also a problem with biological viruses and pathogens, according to the National Institutes of Health. The parallels between computer and biological threats is striking.
One NIH division notes:
In addition to the continual discovery of new human pathogens, old infectious disease enemies are "re-emerging." Natural genetic variations, recombinations, and adaptations allow new strains of known pathogens to appear to which the immune system has not been previously exposed and is therefore not primed to recognize (e.g., influenza). Furthermore, human behavior plays an important role in re-emergence. Increased and sometimes imprudent use of antimicrobial drugs and pesticides has led to the development of resistant pathogens, allowing many diseases that were formerly treatable with drugs to make a comeback (e.g. tuberculosis, malaria, nosocomial, and food-borne infections). Recently, decreased compliance with vaccination policy has also led to re-emergence of diseases such as measles and pertussis, that were previously under control.
Computer malware is similary adapting, spreading subject to a large degree to social engineering factors, and as the Dark Reading article argues, in the case of older malware, making a come back to to lack of specific defenses for it.
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