Virus Writers Going Local

The program is nasty. It deletes pictures and movies from your hard drive and then it teases you: "Even though Mr. Kaneko was found guilty, you are still using Winny. I really hate such people," taunts an animated woman on your screen.

Welcome to the age of localized malware.

Over the past two years virus writers have increasingly targeted their malicious programs to users in different regions of the globe, creating programs that are specially designed to infect users in countries like Japan, Brazil, China or Germany.

Take the taunting Trojan, which goes after users of the Winny file-sharing program. (Winny creator Isamu Kaneko was convicted of abetting copyright violations in late 2006) Winny is file-sharing software that is incredibly popular in Japan, but virtually unknown outside of the region. Still, it's been the target of several malware programs, according to Dave Marcus, security research and communications manager for McAfee Avert Labs. "Japan has some really unique factors that we just don't see anywhere else," he said. "There are a couple of malware writers in Japan who don't like people who illegally share content."

Previously, attackers would write programs that would affect the largest possible number of users, but that's no longer necessarily the case, Marcus said. "What we've noticed over the last couple of years is that a growing amount of malware is localized."