The Malware of the Future May Come Bearing Real Gifts

An anonymous reader writes "Research by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the University of California leads him to believe that the malware of the future will come in a friendly form, be genuinely useful and may not reveal its intentions for a protracted period of time. Prof. Vigna, speaking at IP Expo in London, outlined a fearful future of 'mimicry' in evolved strains of malware. In the current stage of the war between malware and security researchers, the emphasis is almost entirely on the attempt to convince increasingly intelligent — and increasingly suspicious — malware that it is operating in a bare-metal environment when it is in fact in a sandbox or VM environment. For the malware, the stakes are tremendously high — if it has reached the point of OS-level execution without its hash being indexed and red-flagged by online security databases, it cannot afford to reveal its intentions in a test environment. This article outlines the extraordinary game of cat-and-mouse being played between researchers and hackers, and how future malware exploits are likely to abandon a rush for the buffer overflow in favor of 'the long game' — and to make themselves useful in the process.

Comments

Adobe Digital Editions 4

[Bob9113]

Research by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the University of California leads him to believe that the malware of the future will come in a friendly form, be genuinely useful and may not reveal its intentions for a protracted period of time.

Some of it will even turn the American public library system into an infectious host. Adobe Digital Editions 4 scans your hard drive and sends some of the data it finds, in the clear, back to Adobe.

Re:but useful software is not cheap to make

[Cenan]

AC? Meet download.cnet.com. All the crap you could ever want, nicely bundled with more spyware than you care to imagine. If you're ever in the market for some free software, and dumb enough to use Google to find it, chances are you'll be presented with a forest of hits all directing you there.

Quality has nothing to do with it. These guys have made a business out of bundling mediocre with bad or downright malicious, and have put in a lot of effort to appear high enough on search engines to catch eyes. Malware authors don't need to produce anything useful at all.

Don't most trojans already work kinda like this?

[mmell]

Malware authors need only take their existing freeware "products" and put a timer in to delay payload delivery. I can conceive of several ways to do this with only minimal effort.