eWeek.com ran an article (Trend Micro: RSS Is Worm Bot’s Next Target) yesterday covering Trend Micro’s warning about worm bot’s exploiting RSS aggregators. What is curious is that this is old news. So why is Trend Micro bringing this up now? Did they need some press or were they just trying to catch a ride on the growing popularity of Blogs?

The idea of a rogue site publishing an RSS feed that could expose the user to a worm is not novel. It’s just a natural progression of virus writers to go from hijacking web browsers (or instant messaging, et al.) to target the growing number of aggregators. They just had to wait for the number of newsreaders to get to the point where it made sense for them to write the worm.

With the forthcoming IE 7 and its support for RSS built in the RSS audience will greatly expand . And yes, just as with any activity on the Internet, you have to be smart. But firewall and antivirus vendors will easily be able to add their existing virus detection definitions to RSS packets.

It is great that a company as large as Trend Micro is acknowledging the growth of RSS but this is not news.

This entry was posted by Ted Pibil on Wednesday, November 30th, 2005 at 11:40 am and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.