Crimeware

Chapter 16. Technical Defense Techniques

Peter Ferrie, Markus Jakobsson, Zulfikar Ramzan, Erik Stolterman, Xiaofeng Wang, Susanne Wetzel, and Liu Yang

While crimeware is a growing problem, there are a number of ways to counteract it. Some of these countermeasures, especially those that are specific to a given class of threat, have been covered in other chapters. In this chapter, we will consider additional countermeasures.

When computer viruses first became an issue, there were relatively few of them, and classical antivirus software could afford to scan files for known bad examples. The software would maintain a list of virus signatures, which it would scan for. These signatures are often created and verified by an actual person (a virus analyst) ...