CAT virus may be hot topic at hackers’ meet

Abhinav Karnwal,product-marketing manager,Trend Micro,a content security firm,said that the conflicker or downad as it is known is not a new virus and was in the cyberspace for about a year.

“But it could also be a new variant of the old virus. It was considered to be the one of the notorious viruses due to the threat. Microsoft in the near past had come up with a patch to overcome the vulnerability to this particular threat. It may spread from removable drives or via Internet. Nimda is there for a long time and is known to corrupt files,” said Karnwal.

He said that it will be difficult to ascertain whether it was a new variant or those existing ones that caused the failure. “It is estimated that one new virus comes up in every two seconds in the cyber space so it is difficult to track down without analysing the actual threat. According to a study that we carried out in India,top source of virus spread is Internet followed by external devices,” he added.

Rohit Srivastwa,an ethical hacker and founder of Clubhack that is organising the international convention,it could be lack of proper configuration of the systems that could have caused the harm. “If the operating system is not properly configured it could result in virus attack. The anti-virus should also be updated. failure in either of the two can lead to such virus attacks,” he said.