14 DAY TRIAL // Malware seems to have a certain graphic that it loyally follows and once it heads for a certain direction, it keeps going that way like there's no turning back. Well, that is what happens most of the times, but it seems that as of late, we've had our share of retarded malware and by that I mean threats that popped up later than expected. It seems that some virus creators do not follow the trend and instead of doing what everyone else is, they're creating viruses that would have been "trendy" years ago.
Surely, if you have read the news, then you know that nowadays, a malicious user is "cool" if he's involved with botnets, spyware, Trojans, rootkits and such. Parasitic threats are "so last year" as fashion gurus would say. But what do you know? Some people will go against the stream - as Vinoo Thomas points out in a post on McAfee Avert Labs Blog, over the last year we've seen classic file infecting viruses coming back to life. And he even says which threats have been plaguing us in the decrepit manner - it's W32/Bacalid, W32/Detnat and W32/Polip.
So it seems that viruses in cyber-space are similar to cars in the real world. Even though new performing models pop up every day, some people still prefer a low-rider or something like that. Also, some malware writers, though involved with old types of threats will point out that they have a lot of style. Like Mr. Thomas underlines in the same blog post, the person who wrote the W32/Virut embedded the virus body with a passage from a poem by Nietzsche! Unfortunately, while showing off his poetic side, he made several mistakes when coding the virus. It would hijack its own function calls which leads to an infinite loop - see what Nietzsche's poetry does to programmers?