The Bagle.BW Worm. Just another bagle variant? Maybe. Maybe not.
As noted by the F-Secure team this particular variant now includes such features as a SOCKS 4/5 and HTTP CONNECT proxy and an SMTP relay.
Great news for spammers, crackers and virus writers I bet. We’re almost getting to the features provided by a default Windows install (less Solitaire, of course).
So, how long before we get a ‘fully featured’ virus, with their own tcp/ip stack, web, messaging and email services. Quite possibly a ‘user (*hacker*) interface’ to the thing, for runtime configurable options. In short, how long before we start getting a virus with so many features it pretty much constitutes it’s own operating system.
Will we start getting viruses of viruses? Sure, it happens in nature all the time. (Ask a biologist about viral pathogens and bacteriophage (ok, viruses infecting bacteria is slightly different, but I digress)).
And what constitutes an operating system? Why should viruses have to exploit a flaw in the operating system they infect? Why not simply bypass all o/s controls and interface with the hardware directly?