Where has the pc virus gone?

katz

katz

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I've wondered about this several times. You all know, back in the day, many different virus's ran rampant, it made up a fair chunk of our business, especially residential. Am I to believe that the anti-virus companies have gotten that good? PC's that much more secure at the OS level?

I know, we still get malware, browser hijacks, etc., stuff like that from time to time, most times it is a customer installing a downloaded pgm. & leaving all the check boxes checked.

So, have all the virus authors gotten older, moved on to other things and younger ones are not coming along to take their place? I kinda miss the good old days of banging away at a system & solving the infection issue...and of course, the revenue stream that it produced. ;)

Your thoughts/comments?
 
Yeah, I know that is a lot of the younger mindset, but for me in my mid-40's, I have always abhorred a small screen device for anything like web surfing, videos, and the like. Maybe once they start aging, they will move to larger screens and we will see a resurgence in the virus activity. ;)

Follow up question; why would the virus writers not be going after phone & mobile devices? I have only had a handful of "infected" portable devices, and those were the fake viruses anyway, easily removed.
 
I would say:
-OS security and NAT routers/firewalls have closed many holes.
-The holes left are helped out by email filtering, even free email accounts have some now.
-General awareness probably helps a bit
-Collective "computering" experience is growing. People are getting a bit better at spotting scams.
 
I seem to do more cleanups because of people falling for tech support scams then actual virus removals these days. It is even easier then removing fake av's and cleaning up something that wasn't even there in the first place.
 
Certainly the gaping holes are far more rare these days, but also I think the nefarious creators of such things have found Malware to be more effective at causing havoc and, in some cases, more profitable than "traditional" viruses.
 
Now that everyone's more aware of threats, I think antivirus has gotten better, and Windows has gotten more secure. People seem to have also learned to be a bit more skeptical of online offers and whatnot.

That being said, we still have plenty of clients that come in with malware infections (though I will say that the need for complete OS reinstalls has gone down).
 
DMC Unlimited said:
Certainly the gaping holes are far more rare these days, but also I think the nefarious creators of such things have found Malware to be more effective at causing havoc and, in some cases, more profitable than "traditional" viruses.
Click to expand...
This^^^
There is a distinction between "Viruses" and "Malware," although there are cases of crossover.
"Trojans" for example, by far the most prevalent Malware, are also called viruses because of their behaviour.
A virus in the true sense is "destructive" (doesn't make any money!) whereby malware is designed for "stealth" (collects data that can be used for financial gain)
For the curious:
www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-malware-and-virus/
 
Maybe I should rephrase the original question to "where has all the malware/virus gone...".

In other words, I see a steep decline in both, even though the "drive by media" likes to sensationalize how bad it all is. Even the India/MSoft scam calls don't seem to be all that prevalent these days, at least among my customers. This stuff was my "bread & butter." Not saying I like to see folks data put at risk, but I do need to make a living.

It's even a hard sell to push paid AV, when the ISP's offer the email filtering for free.
 
because to my knowledge there is no toolkit right now that isnt focused on banking and there is very little incentive for someone to code a new one when ransomware is childs play and makes them more money. i've been out of the game for a while so I could be mistaken here.

also due to the time gap since the last serious rootkit toolkit (that focused on ad revenue) the small ad networks that were used have lost a lot of their customers.
 
Porthos said:
I think a part of this is people using portable devices Phones/Tablets more than the traditional desktop/laptop. I have had clients tell me they only turn the computers on 1-2 times a month to pay bills all other activities are done on the phone.
Click to expand...
This. The residential computer market is drying up. People don't use computers anymore for daily use for the most part.
 
katz said:
Follow up question; why would the virus writers not be going after phone & mobile devices? I have only had a handful of "infected" portable devices, and those were the fake viruses anyway, easily removed.
Click to expand...
Because phones, for the most part, are really quite secure. It is very hard to infect most phones because they need to be rooted or jailbroken to gain full access. Also, most phones except photos have very little data on them. When properly setup, they sync with the cloud, so if you really screw up the phone you can just factory reset and start over. Or use that as an excuse to buy a new phone which lots of people do.
 
The main difference I think is back in 2010 you had kids playing flash based games on IE8 which was a cyber criminals dream. Now most kids are on smart phones and tablets which don't even have flash or java to exploit.
 
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Virus activity has dropped more or less proportionally with the roll out of Windows 10, in my observations. The reasoning I think is two-fold. First, installing Windows 10 surely "fixed" any virus issues for Millions of people. Secondly, Windows 10 IS more secure and has a few things going for it (Blocking downloaded apps, Edge (lack of plugins - get from store, dropping of ActiveX, no more BHO's). Also, many vulnerable applications such as old flash players, Acrobat readers, etc got refreshed or removed per Windows 10 upgrade. Windows is actually 'fairly' secure, it's been the installed applications that have opened vulnerabilities. While Windows 10 CAN be exploited by itself, most of those standalone exploits require the attacker to be on the same network, but I digress.

The narrative that "Computers are going away" and "tablets and phones are taking over", simply does not hold water.

(Latest 7/12/16) PC Sales are UP in the US, but don't expect a great comeback
PC sales are down 5.2%(Gartner), PC Sales are down 4.5%(IDC)
Worldwide, PC shipments are still on the decline year-over-year. Gartner says shipments have fallen 5.2 percent to 64.3 million, while IDC says 4.5 percent to 62.4 million. Either way, the trend line is down. Both firms attribute the US gains to a strong dollar coupled with the PC upgrade cycle among businesses and government customers.
Click to expand...
The tablet market is 100 million units smaller than expected. What happened?
Where have all the tablets gone?
Tablet sales are still shrinking—except for tablets that mimic PCs
Tablet sales down 10.1%, 13.7% - Tablets that mimic PC's, sales are UP (That's Windows, guys!)
At 206.8 million, tablet shipments last year were 10.1 percent down on 2014. The decline in the fourth quarter—which, with the holiday season, accounted for almost a third of the year’s sales—was even more marked, down 13.7 percent on a year earlier, according to market researcher IDC.
Click to expand...
IDC: Smartphone shipments flat for the first time; Samsung widens lead over Apple in Q1 2016
This figure is up just 0.2 percent from the 334.3 million units in Q1 2015, marking the smallest year-over-year growth on record. We saw hints of this in yesterday’s Apple earnings report, when the company reported an iPhone sales drop for the first time. Despite the poor state of the worldwide smartphone market, Samsung continues to dominate. In Q1 2016, the South Korean company once again shipped more smartphones than any other vendor. In fact, Samsung out-shipped the next two smartphone makers — Apple and Huawei — combined.
Click to expand...

According to the interwebs there are more than 2 Billion computers in service.
Pew Research says that Desktop and Laptop computers are owned by 73% of US adults while Smartphones are 68% and Tablets at 45%. (April-June, 2015).

So no, the numbers don't really fit the narrative so well. A depressed global economy, longer service use of CPU's and less upgrade moves on the part of consumers are thought to be the main drivers of declining sales, not that people are abandoning their devices in lieu of others (That was the media's 'hair-on-fire' story of 2013-2015).

The market has been saturated with PC's and is now becoming saturated with Tablets and Phones. Nothing grows forever.

It will just be a matter of time, IMO, before Virus work returns as Windows 10 ages and people have time to both make effective viruses/exploits and get infected.
 
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OK, I looked at that site, but simply because "Google says" during a product rollout/investor prospectus without any figures doesn't make it so and is often embellished. On the same page they quote this:
Untitled-1.jpg


So are we to believe that in the course of 1.5y that Tablets and Smartphones(Combined searches of 18.5B) have overtaken the 45.5 Billion PC searches, based on actual data and not hearsay on part of Google at an Adwords product launch that would benefit from such a claim? Again, it just doesn't hold water, IMO. Need some data to make it true.

I'm not arguing that phones/tablets are not increasing their share of usage, that is inevitable. In the same breath though, 2-in-1 Windows Tablet sales are UP which points to something other than a decline of "Windows", it would seem. I suspect all of these devices will co-exist just fine.

On a final note, I don't find that "Searches by device" is a very telling figure and here's why: I would expect a Google phone that uses "Search" for almost everything and is linked in maps, programs, browsers, smart text, phone etc - to produce an "artificial" number. Yes, searches can be up for these devices but that really tells of nothing of actual usage(or non-usage), instead it speaks volumes of how well Google has funneled queries to their product, by their product.

EDIT: I'll add this as well:
http://searchengineland.com/half-of-google-search-is-mobile-232994
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that desktop searches have diminished. Stats on desktop search from comScore routinely show the overall amount has risen from month to month. Rather, it’s that mobile searches have been a growing new segment that have caught up and now overtaken desktop search.

On the whole, desktop search has grown. As a percentage, it has dropped. That’s because we’re living in what I’ve called an “always-on search world,” where we’re always able to search. Got a query? Your phone is always in reach, as opposed to the past when you’d have to get to wherever your computer was. So the overall search queries happening have grown.
Click to expand...
 
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