The Malware tag covers malware families, infrastructure analysis, incident impact, disruption efforts, and defensive guidance to reduce cybersecurity risk.
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Background for this topic.
Malware is software intentionally created or modified to perform unauthorized or harmful actions on a computer, device, or network. The term covers distinct families and functions, including viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, botnet clients, and ransomware; a single sample may combine several capabilities. Its behavior—not its label—determines the security concern: it may execute code, persist, alter or encrypt data, steal credentials, or provide unauthorized remote access.
For practitioners, malware reporting is most useful when it identifies the family or tool conservatively and provides evidence such as affected platforms, samples, infrastructure, or observed behavior. Defenses include promptly patching vulnerable software, restricting execution and privileges, monitoring endpoints and networks, maintaining tested backups, and isolating suspected systems for analysis. Detection should use behavior and verified indicators rather than names alone, since variants change. If malware processes personal or regulated data, investigations should also address privacy, evidence preservation, and applicable reporting obligations.
A new IoT botnet malware dubbed RapperBot has been observed rapidly evolving its capabilities since it was first discovered in mid-June 2022
A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems
An unknown threat actor has been targeting Russian entities with a newly discovered remote access trojan called Woody RAT for at least a year as part of a spear-phishing campaign
Threat actors are increasingly mimicking legitimate applications like Skype, Adobe Reader, and VLC Player as a means to abuse trust relationships and increase the likelihood of a successful social engineering attack
Ransomware is a kind of malware used by cybercriminals to stop users from accessing their systems or files; the cybercriminals then threaten to leak, destroy or withhold sensitive information unless a ransom is paid
The operators of the Gootkit access-as-a-service (AaaS) malware have resurfaced with updated techniques to compromise unsuspecting victims