Malware Ben

[Map Rousch]

Malwarecan penetrate your computer when (deep breath now) you surf through hacked websites, view a legitimate site serving malicious ads, download infected files, install programs or apps from unfamiliar provide, open a malicious email attachment (malspam), or pretty much everything else you download from the web on to a device that lacks a quality anti-malware security application.

Given the variety of malware types and the massive number of variants released into the wild daily, a full history of malware would comprise a list too long to include here. That said, a look at malware trends in recent decades is more manageable. Here are the main trends in malware development.

Disseminated by infected floppy disks, the virus itself was harmless, but it spread to all disks attached to a system, exploding so virulently that it can be considered the first large-scale computer virus outbreak in history. Note that this was prior to any Windows PC malware. Since then, viruses and worms have become widespread.

2007 to 2009: Malware scammers turned to social networks such as Myspace as a channel for delivering rogue advertisements, links to phishing pages, and malicious applications. After Myspace declined in popularity, Facebook and Twitter became the preferred platforms.

In fact, Malwarebytes saw more Mac malware in 2017 than in any previous year. By the end of 2017, the number of new unique threats that our professionals counted on the Mac platform was more than 270 percent higher compared to the number noted in 2016.

Malware criminals love the mobile market. After all, smartphones are sophisticated, complex handheld computers. They also offer an entrance into a treasure trove of personal information, financial details, and all manner of valuable data for those seeking to make a dishonest dollar.

Unfortunately, this has spawned an exponentially increasing number of malicious attempts to take advantage of smartphone vulnerabilities. From adware, Trojans, spyware, worms, and ransomware, malware can find its way onto your phone in a number of ways. Clicking on a dodgy link or downloading an unreliable app are some obvious culprits, but you can also get infected through emails, texts, and even your Bluetooth connection. Moreover, malware such as worms can spread from one infected phone to another without any interaction from the user.

A hacked microphone and camera can record everything you see and say. A hacked GPS can broadcast your every move. Even worse, mobile malware can be used to evade the multi-factor authentication (MFA) many apps use to keep our data secure.

While not currently popular with cybercriminals, cryptominers seem to be equal opportunity about their targets, going after both individuals and businesses. Ransomware, on the other hand, targets businesses, hospitals, municipalities, and retail store systems in disproportionately greater numbers than consumers.

The majority of malware attacks on businesses as of late have been the result of TrickBot. First detected in 2016, the Trickbot banking Trojan has already gone through several iterations as its authors strengthen its evasion, propagation, and encryption abilities.

Malware, or malicious software, is a term for any kind of computer software with malicious intent. Most online threats are some form of malware. Malware can take many forms, including viruses, worms, trojan horses, ransomware, and spyware.

Malware (a portmanteau of malicious software)[1] is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive access to information, or which unknowingly interferes with the user's computer security and privacy.[1][2][3][4][5] Researchers tend to classify malware into one or more sub-types (i.e. computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, wipers and keyloggers).[1]

Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet.[6][7] According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016.[8] Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year.[9] Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network.[10]

The defense strategies against malware differ according to the type of malware but most can be thwarted by installing antivirus software, firewalls, applying regular patches, securing networks from intrusion, having regular backups and isolating infected systems. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.[8]

The notion of a self-reproducing computer program can be traced back to initial theories about the operation of complex automata.[11] John von Neumann showed that in theory a program could reproduce itself. This constituted a plausibility result in computability theory. Fred Cohen experimented with computer viruses and confirmed Neumann's postulate and investigated other properties of malware such as detectability and self-obfuscation using rudimentary encryption. His 1987 doctoral dissertation was on the subject of computer viruses.[12] The combination of cryptographic technology as part of the payload of the virus, exploiting it for attack purposes was initialized and investigated from the mid-1990s, and includes initial ransomware and evasion ideas.[13]

Before Internet access became widespread, viruses spread on personal computers by infecting executable programs or boot sectors of floppy disks. By inserting a copy of itself into the machine code instructions in these programs or boot sectors, a virus causes itself to be run whenever the program is run or the disk is booted. Early computer viruses were written for the Apple II and Mac, but they became more widespread with the dominance of the IBM PC and MS-DOS. The first IBM PC virus in the wild was a boot sector virus dubbed (c)Brain, created in 1986 by the Farooq Alvi brothers in Pakistan.[14] Malware distributors would trick the user into booting or running from an infected device or medium. For example, a virus could make an infected computer add autorunnable code to any USB stick plugged into it. Anyone who then attached the stick to another computer set to autorun from USB would in turn become infected, and also pass on the infection in the same way.[15]

Older email software would automatically open HTML email containing potentially malicious JavaScript code. Users may also execute disguised malicious email attachments. The 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon, cited by CSO Online, states that emails are the primary method of malware delivery, accounting for 96% of malware delivery around the world.[16][17]

The first worms, network-borne infectious programs, originated not on personal computers, but on multitasking Unix systems. The first well-known worm was the Morris worm of 1988, which infected SunOS and VAX BSD systems. Unlike a virus, this worm did not insert itself into other programs. Instead, it exploited security holes (vulnerabilities) in network server programs and started itself running as a separate process.[18] This same behavior is used by today's worms as well.[19]

With the rise of the Microsoft Windows platform in the 1990s, and the flexible macros of its applications, it became possible to write infectious code in the macro language of Microsoft Word and similar programs. These macro viruses infect documents and templates rather than applications (executables), but rely on the fact that macros in a Word document are a form of executable code.[20]

Since the rise of widespread broadband Internet access, malicious software has more frequently been designed for profit. Since 2003, the majority of widespread viruses and worms have been designed to take control of users' computers for illicit purposes.[24] Infected "zombie computers" can be used to send email spam, to host contraband data such as child pornography,[25] or to engage in distributed denial-of-service attacks as a form of extortion.[26] Malware is used broadly against government or corporate websites to gather sensitive information,[27] or to disrupt their operation in general. Further, malware can be used against individuals to gain information such as personal identification numbers or details, bank or credit card numbers, and passwords.[28][29]

In addition to criminal money-making, malware can be used for sabotage, often for political motives. Stuxnet, for example, was designed to disrupt very specific industrial equipment. There have been politically motivated attacks which spread over and shut down large computer networks, including massive deletion of files and corruption of master boot records, described as "computer killing." Such attacks were made on Sony Pictures Entertainment (25 November 2014, using malware known as Shamoon or W32.Disttrack) and Saudi Aramco (August 2012).[30][31]

Malware can be classified in numerous ways, and certain malicious programs may fall into two or more categories simultaneously.[1] Broadly, software can categorised into three types:[32] (i) goodware; (ii) greyware and (iii) malware.

A computer virus is software usually hidden within another seemingly innocuous program that can produce copies of itself and insert them into other programs or files, and that usually performs a harmful action (such as destroying data).[33] They have been likened to biological viruses.[3] An example of this is a portable execution infection, a technique, usually used to spread malware, that inserts extra data or executable code into PE files.[34] A computer virus is software that embeds itself in some other executable software (including the operating system itself) on the target system without the user's knowledge and consent and when it is run, the virus is spread to other executable files.

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