Slashdot Mirror
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.
It's already here. They're called smartphone apps.
xkcd 810.
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.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Adobes already doing this! They're such an awesome company, leading the way into our Brave New World!
Reports your system as a VM to everything
Sigger than your average
There's a gift, which may be ongoing, but it has a nasty payload.
Never had either an STD or computer malware.
Paranoia is your friend, 'cause they ARE out to get you.
No, the software itself isn't infected with malware, actually. What happens is they infect the keygens or cracks. This is because most software applications are actually signed, as are installers, so they don't bother infecting that - they distribute the original installers with all the original signatures intact.
But since to use it requires running the crack executable to get the key, well, the user will just double-click it, get their machine infected, and the key to unlock the program they just installed.
And it's been happening a long time - it's why cracks and keygens are long tagged by AV apps - because while there are a few clean cracks and keygens, you can bet most you find on torrent sites and elsewhere are infected.
Is this guy new here or what? Ostensibly useful ("friendly", since TFS apparently wants to anthropomorphize software) programs that carry a nasty payload that doesn't trigger immediately? How's that any different from 20 years ago, when they were called "trojans?"
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.
... whatever
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.
Or just run each app in its own VM so that when it turns rogue, you can cleanly shoot it in the head without any widespread damage.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Reminds me of the late 90s/early 2000s when millions of accounts for a german online service (T-Online) have been stolen - by 3rd party tool for that service that offered additional services including up/downing your connection (which was essential for those high, minute based rates back then. Butso it had your password, of course)
It was a PITA to convince people to stop using that tool because it was so usefull.
bickerdyke
You mean, like trojans inside apps since the 60s? This is a new low even for slashdot.
To protect yourself from malware, litter your system with artefacts that mimic sandboxes and virtual machines :)
Some citations:
Transmission rates based on infected partner's progression stage
Risk based on type of sexual act
It is difficult to get HIV from a woman. Not impossible, but the odds are very low.
Well, not that low, only half the odds, according to study 2.
Now getting HIV from taking it on the butt, it is much more dangerous
Yup. 0.08/0.04 (vaginal) vs 1.4 (annal receptive). About 20x more odds.
And then black woman have a much higher rate of HIV.
Technically, its "women in poorer communities". It happens that in the US black ethnic are often at the bottom of the social scale due to past racial discriminations, etc. but even there they are not alone at the bottom of the scale.
On all this counts, Magic Johnson is not exactly the best example.
He might happen to also be ethnically black, but given his economical situation and popularity, I doubt that he spends his time banging crack-whores. So the fact that HIV is more prevalent among the poorest section of the population has probably rather little impact.
Also, for what I know, he was only interested in women, which lack the proper biological appendage to being a risk for insertive annal (though not properly clean sex-toys might still be a potential danger).
The main reason he caught AIDS are probably due to a high number of partners combined with lack of proper protection.
In fact Magic Johnson helped bring awareness that HIV isn't exclusively targeting drug-addicts and homosexuals.
To transpose that to malware:
the fact that malware are more often found at warez sites ridden with keygen containing hidden malware, and dubious porn site running ads used by hacker to corrupt your system, DOES NOT MEAN that these are the only way a random internet user might get the computer infected by malware.
on the other hand, proper precaution will ALWAYS be a good solution to protect and diminish the risks. (virus scanner, filters, malware blocker, ad-blocker, VMs, etc.)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
My mother had a few of those. Some coupon app on her desktop that was actually advertised by her local news station for getting an aggregated searchable list of coupons available and where to acquire them. It did what it was supposed to. It also downloaded and installed additional applications and hijacked your browser (eg: toolbar search goes to their stuff no matter which option you select, added adverts to websites, and displayed popup ads with fake warnings)
http://botcrawl.com/cnet-downl...
From 2013:
"It’s now verified that CNET bundles malware with their downloads in order to monetize free products and services. To add more, CNET has been sued by numerous software manufacturers for bundling malware with installments of their distributed software, even without notifying the developers. This often causes victims of CNET malware to report the legitimate software they downloaded from the distributor as unethical."
I stopped using cnet in 2011, the first time I ever came across Webget which nearly bricked my system.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
which is one reason I don't use Steam (sorry to burst your "everyone" bubble, even my KSP is standalone) - when I buy software, I own that particular instance; fuck clickthru license terms, try Doctrine of Sale.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel