Virus writers are likely to unleash increasingly sophisticated strains of malware next year in an attempt to bounce back from some high-profile botnet shutdowns in 2008, according to new predictions from managed security provider MessageLabs. The company predicted that hackers will launch new attacks in which malware will exist as a virtualization layer running directly on the hardware and undiscoverable by the operating system. “The operating system does not know it’s there, and the malware will be intercepting low-level operating system calls,” explained MessageLabs’ Paul Wood.
