RSS Feeds: the new road for viruses?

December is always the month where bloggers are launching their predictions for the new year and I see that someone has just started to spread its prediction now.

I've never joined the game but maybe this year I could launch myself on it... However, here one of my prediction for the future (I was talking about it in these days with friends): we'll see soon the first form of viruses that will spread themself via RSS.

RSS feeds are now an emerging technology and all modern browsers now have a built-in support for them. When the new IE7 will be out, also the number 1 of browsers (as number of users) will have a native support for them, so you can agree with me that this is an interesting road to embrace for a virus writer.

A new worm generation could arrive to destination (the user PC) via a standard RSS feed, could attack the RSS application installed on it (a browser or an RSS Reader), could subscribe malicious feeds and start to install malicious software on the target machine.

This could be extremely dangerous I think and actually I can't see a product that is ready to check this possible new type of infection.

We must be ready for this new possibility of attacks, because the RSS Worm day is not so remote I think...

Print | posted on Friday, December 02, 2005 9:37 AM

Comments on this post

# re: RSS Feeds: the new road for viruses?

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I've had the same worry (virus-via-rss) for a while, too (http://www.rjdudley.com/blog/Know+When+To+Quit.aspx).
Left by Richard Dudley on Dec 02, 2005 3:48 PM

# re: RSS Feeds: the new road for viruses?

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Richard, I hope we will be wrong...
Left by Stefano Demiliani on Dec 02, 2005 5:36 PM

# re: RSS Feeds: the new road for viruses?

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I hop so too, but sadly, I doubt it.
Left by Richard Dudley on Dec 04, 2005 1:19 PM

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