'Weblog for Mydoom incident started' was the first entry in F-Secure's weblog back in January 2004. Since its inception the F-Secure weblog has now become a solid reference point for anyone interested to know what's relevant and new in the malware world.
As Chief Research Officer at F-Secure Mikko Hyppönen stated back in January 2006, two years on from that first blog entry, things have changed significantly since:
"In the beginning we were only planning to create a temporary blog to cover the Mydoom incident. This was the massive attack launched by Mydoom.A on the 30th of January 2004 to take down sco.com. About 800 blog posts and two years later, we're now regularly seeing tens of thousands of readers a month, and our blog has been ranked among the top 500 blogs in the world by Feedster.'
Bagels and monkeys
Around the same time as the Mydoom incident, the virus laboratory team were also fighting against attacks from Bagle variants - something which continues to this day as malware authors add to its complexity with their own mutations. Regular readers to the blog will also know that every new Bagle variant that puts the virus laboratory to work also prompts the order of a large batch of real bagels to enjoy. And so, the habits of an otherwise relatively anonymous team of researchers have become well known to readers, including the placing of the plush monkey on the laboratory table at the start of any major outbreak.
Unlike most blogs, The F-Secure weblog is the collaborative effort of many writers each with their own particular malware specialisation. In this way, expert perspectives on an outbreak or appearance of a new malware, are it PC-based or mobile, are available to enquiring journalists and other interested parties often ahead of 'official' press releases. Browsers of the blog are also able to follow the course of a virus outbreak in greater detail compared to the 'filtered' versions provided by the popular press. Being a blog, the news event is often accompanied by personal commentary, which adds its own value to the reader.
What is a rootkit?
The blog itself is also a showcase for other data security events - there are regular reports from conferences, seminars and media happenings. One entry in particular which generated a lot of blog traffic was the now infamous Sony Rootkit case. The discovery, first made by F-Secure of embedded rootkits in legally bought Sony CDs made international news and put the Sony Corporation into disrepute for its off-hand behaviour towards its customers. The web team were quick to respond to President of Global Digital Business at Sony BMG, Thomas Hesse's comment 'Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?' by printing it on a number of T-shirts and arranging a competition for them to its regular audience of browsers. Earlier in October The web team also shot a video entitled 'How to brick a PSP in which a brand new Sony PSP is rendered useless with a trojan that overwrites system files. A week later the video had generated around 207, 000 downloads roughly doubling F-Secure's websites traffic.
Overall, the F-Secure weblog is also about creating a personal link with visitors to the company's public website. In quieter times, the laboratory researchers might even be inclined to give a weather report from frozen Helsinki or share a joke that they find amusing. Whatever the composition of the formula, it clearly seems to work as thousands of regular visitors to the website testify.
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