Quotes About Malware

A Nation State or Cyber-Mercenary won't hack e-voting machines one by one. This takes too long and will have minimal impact. Instead, they'll take an easier approach like spear phishing the manufacturer with malware and poison the voting machine update pre-election and allow the manufacturer to update each individual machine with a self-deleting payload that will target the tabulation process.

A single spear-phishing email carrying a slightly altered malware can bypass multi-million dollar enterprise security solutions if an adversary deceives a cyber-hygienically apathetic employee into opening the attachment or clicking a malicious link and thereby compromising the entire network.

Hacking a national election is simple. Exploit a vulnerability in the manufacturer's network, poison the tabulation software update with self-deleting malware and let the manufacturer send to their field reps and election consultants who update the election systems.

Signature-based malware detection is dead. Machine learning based Artificial Intelligence is the most potent defense the next gen adversary and the mutating hash.

The two main problems with signature and heuristic based anti-virus is the mutating hash and the fact that you first need a victim in order to obtain the signature. James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology

Wannacry is the Stuxnet of Ransomware

Folks are wandering around that proverbial parking lot of the Internet all day long, without giving it a thought to whose attachments they're opening, what sites they're visiting. And that makes it easy for the bad guys.

Nuclear scientists lost their innocence when we used the atom bomb for the very first time. So we could argue computer scientists lost their innocence in 2009 when we started using malware as an offensive attack weapon.

Hunting for malware requires highly specialized knowledge of the intricacies of the domain name system - the protocol that allows us to type email addresses and website names to initiate communication. DNS enables our words to set in motion a chain of connections between servers, which in turn delivers the results we desire.

Stuxnet, the most sophisticated cyber weapon in the world, with code fifty times larger than typical malware.99 The CIA, the NSA, and Israel's elite cyber Unit 8200 reportedly joined forces.100 Forensics revealed that Stuxnet used four rare and valuable "zero day" vulnerabilities (coding flaws unknown to security researchers or software vendors) to find the precise software operating Iran's centrifuges, spread inside, hide, and destroy without a trace.101

Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are not normal, everyday malware, of course. All three of them were most likely developed by a Western intelligence agency as part of covert operations that weren't meant to be discovered. The fact that the malware evaded detection proves how well the attackers did their job.

Obviously, you will always see more malware targeting Android because Android is used more than any smartphone platform by a pretty substantial difference.

Attackers are able to amortize the cost of exploit, malware, and infrastructure development across many targets.

I suspect that it's because their belief system has segmented their world into a moral in-group and out-group so decisively that they're unconflicted about what they're doing. To them, the people they're killing are scarcely human. I think you share my concern about bad ideas being the malware that can get even psychologically normal people, biologically normal people, to do the unthinkable. How do you view this, in the context of your research?

While preventing the distribution of malware through advertising is one part of the equation, it's important to address the entire malware ecosystem and to fight it at each phase of its life cycle.

I think malware is a significant threat because the mitigation, like antivirus software, hasn't evolved to a point to really mitigate the risk to a reasonable degree.

But modern malware is aimed less at exploiting individual computers than exploiting the Internet. A botnet-creating worm doesn't want to harm your computer; it wants to use it.

Today there is big money for those who can stealthily invade computer networks, or construct a secure botnet, and no modern military arsenal is complete without state-of-the-art malware.

We in the FBI have created a malware repository and analysis tool known as the Binary Analysis Characterization and Storage System, or BACSS, which provides near real-time investigative information. BACSS helps us link malware in different jurisdictions and paint a picture of cyber threats worldwide.

Defending against military-strength malware is a real challenge for the computer security industry. Furthermore, the security industry is not global. It is highly focused in just a handful of countries. The rest of the countries rely on foreign security labs to provide their everyday digital security for them.

Internet advertising security and the fight against malware is a top priority for Yahoo.

There are a lot of Yahoo users who live in countries where their freedom of expression and freedom of association is not respected and where the government is trying to put malware on their computers to track them.

One common puzzle for the security-minded is how to work with confidential data on the road. Sometimes you can't bring your laptop, or don't want to. But working on somebody else's machine exposes you to malware and leaves behind all kinds of electronic trails.

Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman. The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more. The report adds that As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.