[TECH/COMPUTER VIRUS] JPEG Worm Breaks New Ground

[intothatgoodnight]

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-935766.html

JPEG Worm Breaks New Ground

By Robert Lemos

Special to ZDNet News

June 13, 2002, 11:50 AM PT

Antivirus companies warned on Thursday of a new virus that communicates through digital images, but security experts aren't sure how much of a threat this latest evolutionary branch of malicious code poses.

Dubbed the first "JPEG infector" by security company Network Associates, the W32/Perrun virus has two parts: infected JPEG images that contain the virus's payload and a viral program that extracts the code from the images and infects other JPEGs on the system as they are opened.

Because PCs have to be infected by the extractor virus before any code hidden in image files can affect them, the program is more a computer-science curiosity than a threat, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates' antivirus emergency response team.

"We are not saying that this is a problem," Gullotto said. "We gave it a low risk, but we haven't seen anything like this before." A digital image carrying code for W32/Perrun is easy to spot, he said, because the image is corrupted by the new code.

PC users should note that they can't be infected by opening a JPEG image. Rather, a virus on an infected computer copies code into a digital image and waits for the JPEG to get passed along to other infected systems. The virus on those systems will read the code fragment in the JPEG image and follow the instructions. Users who haven't been infected by the extractor virus can open an infected digital image and nothing will happen.

The extractor file only infects computers running Microsoft Windows and doesn't include a mass-mailing component. And, in fact, the virus has not been released on the Internet, but has been sent only to major antivirus companies by the creator of the code.

However, the code has opened up a debate among antivirus researchers as to whether viruses with multiple parts could represent a new threat to PC users.

With some rather simple improvements, the virus could pose a threat, Gullotto said.

One obvious modification, which has already been discussed among the virus community, is using steganography--a technique to hide data in pictures--to allow such programs to embed code in images without corrupting the picture.

An upgradable virus is not a new event in the virus world. Hybris, a worm that slowly infected a large number of computers on the Internet last year, could be upgraded with encrypted plug-ins that were posted to Usenet, security experts have said.

Researchers have long worried about the evolving technology in viruses, and the latest critter to climb out of the Internet shows that the arms race with virus writers hasn't slowed.

But for Gullotto, the real lesson is one of foresight.

"People should start becoming more leery of JPEG files," he said. "If there is a chance that we can get ahead of the virus curve in educating the users, we should."

 

[CeeBee]

<h1>NO!</h1>

"People should start becoming more leery of JPEG files," he said. "If there is a chance that we can get ahead of the virus curve in educating the users, we should."

This is NOT the lesson here. This is what the virus writer, a terrorist of sorts, WANTS us to think. The "virus" is lame, it's a laboratory curiousity, was never released into the wild, but only to pique the curiosity of the security community. There is no way a JPEG file can hurt your computer, and there never will be. It is only raw DATA for the real virus to feed upon.

The virus author, with his terroristic threat, wants to blur the line between program and data, and spread paranoia on the Internet. Before you know it, people will become afraid to even send each other pictures, and bulletin boards (even THIS ONE???) will ban the posting of images for fear of spreading something.

 

[teefleur]

Thanks, CeeBee, for jumping in on this one. Sure sounds like a good way to panic the herd - jpeg virus...

 

[intothatgoodnight]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/56/25718.html

First JPEG Virus Not A Threat

By ComputerWire

Posted: 14/06/2002 at 08:25 GMT

Anti-virus firms have discovered a Windows virus that infects JPEG image files, though the chances of it causing a major security risk any time soon are close to zero. W32/Perrun, as Networks Associates Inc named the virus, was assessed as low risk, and has not been found in the wild.

"It is believed to be the first of its kind," said Vincent Gullotto. "It's no danger, but it shows that virus writers are looking at other methods of infection." In the last year, virus writers have started using other file types, such as PDFs and Flash animations, to spread themselves.

Perrun arrives as an executable file. When run, it drops a further "infector" executable onto the machine and adds it to the Windows registry, Gullotto said. Whenever a JPEG file, or a file with a .jpg extension is opened, the infector appends the virus to the end of the file before the image is displayed via the user's preferred image viewer.

Sending infected JPEGs to other, uninfected computers will have no effect, NAI confirmed. Image files do not have the ability to execute malicious code, so simply viewing a JPEG, without the infector running on the same machine, will not have any effect, other than slowing it down while any installed anti-virus software scans it.

"Not only is this virus not in the wild, but also graphic files infected by this virus are completely and utterly harmless, unless they can find an already infected machine to assist them," said Chris Wraight of Sophos Plc. "It's like a cold only being capable of making people who already have runny noses feel ill."

Based on NAI's assessment of the code, the firm believes the Perrun author is also the writer of the W32/Alcop virus, a mass mailer Outlook worm that poses as a pornographic Flash animation of adult actress Aria Giovanni. Alcop was discovered in January, and is also classified as low-risk.

The emergence of the virus also highlighted again the occasional cattiness of the anti-virus industry. NAI's McAfee Security division was the first major vendor to come out with an alert yesterday, but a few hours later, Sophos's US division released a missive urging "vendor restraint."

"Some anti-virus vendors may be tempted to predict the end of the world as we know it, or warn of an impending era when all graphic files should be treated with suspicion. Such experts should be ashamed of themselves," said Wraight at Sophos. A spokesperson added that Sophos was not singling out any of its competitors.

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http://www.azcentral.com/news/reuters/stories/NET-TECH-VIRUSES-DC.shtml

Computer Photo File Virus Discovered, Not Spreading

Jun. 14, 2002 03:51

SAN FRANCISCO - Security researchers have found the first computer virus able to corrupt digital images, including photos, stored on a hard-drive in the popular ``.jpg'' format, an anti-virus company said on Thursday.

The virus, dubbed ``W32/Perrun,'' can corrupt .jpg files but is considered low risk because it has not spread, and was not expected to spread, across the Internet, said Vincent Gullotto, vice president of Network Associates Inc.'s (NYSE:NET) Anti-Virus Response Team.

Even so the Perrun virus was significant because it gave researchers an idea of a new way that computers can be infected, he said. The virus infects .jpg files on a machine but does no real harm, Gullotto said.

``It's not serious, but the nature of what the virus writer has done has us thinking there will be other attempts to do something that is more complicated or that may have the ability to spread in files that are not standard .exe files, which are the ones that typically get infected,'' Gullotto said.

Unlike most viruses these days, which automatically distribute themselves via e-mail systems, this one could arrive in an infected floppy disk, CD, or e-mail, but it does not have the capability to hop from one computer to another, he said.

Also on Thursday, Helsinki-based anti-virus company F-Secure warned of a new worm that appears to be spreading through e-mail, although it too was considered low risk.

The danger with the so-called Frethem worm, a self-replicating virus, is that it can infect a computer if a user opens the e-mail that contains it.

The worm does not require that the attachment itself be opened, said Tony Magallanez, a systems engineer for F-Secure in San Jose, California.

The worm sends copies of itself to recipients in the Windows Address Book in Microsoft Outlook or to e-mail addresses listed in databases on an infected system, he said.

Updated anti-virus software will protect computer users, Magallanez said.

The worm started to spread on Tuesday and already there have been seven different variants discovered, he said.