Five Habits Of Highly Successful Malware

Robert Lemos, DarkReading

The Internet frequently represents evolution on steroids, and the malware ecosystem is no different.

Malware has quickly evolved to take advantage of weaknesses in digital defenses. In 2012, more than 40 million Windows systems were infected with malware, according to data collected by Microsoft in its annual Security Intelligence Report. And Google researchers found that, of four common antivirus scanners, the best only detected 25 percent of real-world malware, and combined, the scanners only caught 40 percent of malicious downloads.

Malware writers have honed their technique to do well against current defenses, says Srinavas Kumar, chief technology officer of TaaSERA, a security-service provider.

“The malware writers know how to get around antivirus software,” he says. “They can detect that antivirus is running or that IPS/IDS is watching and make it very difficult to blacklist them.”

To defend against the latest attacks, enterprise security professionals need to know why today’s malware is so successful. Culling data from a number of recent studies and discussions with security experts identifies five strategies for success.

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