For mass-mailing worms like Mydoom, zipping the virus payload makes it smaller, so more copies can be mailed in a given time period, Prakash said. The files have other advantages for virus authors, said Vipul Ved Prakash, founder of San Francisco antispam company Cloudmark Inc., where he's chief scientist. 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 McAfee antivirus unit. That makes it difficult for companies to strip them out of e-mail messages without affecting employees' work, experts said. zip files are an important business tool that many individuals and organizations use to transfer large files. pif files, which have no use in legitimate exchanges. Virus writers noticed that and took advantage of it," he said. exes back and forth started zipping them before they sent them.
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exe files to prevent viruses from coming into their environment, people who wanted to send. zip files, virus authors were also picking up on trends in legitimate e-mail traffic to hide their own malicious creations, Shipp said. zip files in modern systems makes them easy targets for worms like Mydoom. According to Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of security vulnerability scanning company Qualys Inc., embedded support for. pif files, required separate software to be installed on the receiving system before the files can be opened and run, he said.Īll that changed with the release of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP operating system, which included native support for opening. zip files were occasionally used to mask virus payloads, the practice wasn't common in virus-writing circles because. 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 at Solutionary Inc., a managed security services company in Omaha. 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, an antivirus technology expert at MessageLabs Ltd.
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zip file has become embroiled in an arms race between virus writers and antivirus technology companies, experts said. Long a staple of Internet and office communications, the. The files must then be decompressed, or "unzipped," before they can be viewed. Using programs such as WinZip for Windows or Unzip for Unix, users compressed files they want to store or transfer to others. Such files are containers for one or more compact files. The zipped attachments were evidence of what antivirus experts say is a new trend in virus-writing circles: using compressed files to hide viruses and elude detection by antivirus engines.
The e-mail was sent by the recent Mydoom e-mail worm. zip files from long-lost acquaintances, business partners and complete strangers.
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E-mail users who were slow to update their antivirus software last week may have been surprised to receive a flood of e-mail messages containing.
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