News ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ In 29A group: Mental Driller and Super left 29A due inactivity. All 29A members expect they are back as soon as possible. Vecna rejoined 29A after a time "out of home". roy g biv joined 29A. Regards and best wishes to ex-members and welcome to new ones. In VX scene: Since 29A #6 was released back in march of 2002 not many things have happened in the vx scene. Several virus magazines were announced and they finally became vaporware: SLAM #5 that was announced back in march 2002 and The Knight Templar's Fantasy magazine are good examples. The creation of some groups were announced, element or Team Fatum per example, but they never grew up, and other groups disappeared, as Brigada 8. The scene has been waiting IKX's Xine number 6 for a long time but last news tells that the zine will not be released, at least, on next 6 months. Several zines like Black Virus Group, Habitat, Brigada 8, In name of zero, Natural Selection, Mitosis, RRLF or Coderz, Batch Zone were released in this time. http://www.coderz.net was attacked for a long time and the domain had to be taken down working actually only http://coderz.net. Vx Heavens also went down and it's unknown if it will be back ever. David L. Smith was sentenced to 20 months of prision and Simon Vallor to 2 years. In january 2004 the most spreaded virus ever was released, it's name: mydoom. Other worms like Slammer or Sobig had their 15 minutes of fame too. During these 2 years the production of macro virus and viruses in general have decreased really a lot. Actually antivirus software are more focused in developing security suites (anti spam, firewalls, etc) than coding new anti- virus techniques. More than half of the stuff which is added to detection databases is malware: backdoors, trojans, exploits, etc. Microsoft destined 5 million dollars for paying rewards in order to get information that lead to arrest and imprisonment of virus coders. Rewards for Blaster, mydoom or Sobig virus coders have been offered. Gigabyte was arrested some days before the release of this issue due virus coding. She faces 3 years in prison and a possible fine up to as much as $167,000.