RSS Worms

November 30th, 2005

Yahoo! News reports that Trend Micro believes RSS will be the next big target for worms.

David Sancho, senior anti-virus research engineer at Trend Micro, warned that RSS feed hijacking will become commonplace when Microsoft Corp. ships Internet Explorer 7, a browser refresh that will feature built-in RSS support.

In a white paper titled "The Future of Bot Worms," Sancho said the IE7 release "will open some interesting possibilities to worm creators."

"The easy way of taking advantage of the popularity [of RSS] is to hijack the existing configured feed clients to automatically download new copies of worms and other threats to the infected computers. This is accomplished by pointing the already-configured client to different and malicious Web content," Sancho wrote.

I don’t really understand it myself probably because there have never been RSS bot worms to date.

Via Digg.