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Malware refers to any modified script in a software system that aims to cause intentional harm to the victim. The term malware is a portmanteau that blends two words: malicious and software.
Let’s take a good look at this bad situation. We’ll review how malware works, alarming stats and trends, signs that you’re likely infected and, most importantly, ways to prevent this malice.
Malware is commonly deployed to a target system in the form of repackaged software that, first, installs on the system and then modifies the behavior of services and tools that interact with it. It exploits known vulnerabilities in the system and manipulates an unsuspecting victim tricked into installing the malware payload into the target machine.
Malware has several characteristics:
A simple malware may be a few lines of code that modify the behavior of a software system. A virus is a common example.
A complex malware may be a software program that executes sophisticated algorithms designed to affect the performance of a target system or leak data to third parties without being detected by the user and cybersecurity tools. Examples include:
Despite widespread efforts into combating malware, it remains one of the most prevalent cybersecurity threats. This primarily comes down growth: technology adoption is growing fast, but many users lack the necessary cybersecurity awareness.
Known vulnerabilities in old technologies remain unpatched. Social engineering easily manipulates unsuspecting and less tech-savvy users into installing malware designed to exploit these vulnerabilities. And the results are concerning:
How does an average user determine whether their machines are under a malware attack? Successful malware attacks are characterized by their invisibility property. They remain under the radar — even when you’ve installed expensive antivirus tools on your machine.
However, it is quite easy to identify the subtle consequences of any installed malware. If your machines are infected with malware, watch out for the following signs:
Ads serve the purpose of making money by compromising a target system. Flooding a website with ads gives advertisers the ability to reach more audience, albeit at the visual inconvenience of their targets.
A malware may be executing repetitive and parallel requests, overflowing RAM buffer and cache, which makes your computer slow. Or, it may be running crypto mining and peer-to-peer resource sharing programs in the background that slow down your machine.
While you expect to have ample storage at your disposal, malware programs may occupy hard disk space and install bloatware. The purpose of bloatware may be to…
If you’re not streaming videos or playing games online, but still find your internet performing slowly, it is likely that spyware may be running in the background or that your machine may be a part of a larger botnet attempting a Denial of Service attack.
Perhaps you were socially engineered to change browser settings that allow websites to track your location or change the default search engine? Have some apps obtained permission to use your mic and webcam without your knowledge?
All these signs are subtle and potentially a consequence of a malware attack. But by the time you recognize these signs, it’s already too late. If it was a malware attack, you have already fallen victim to it and may not be fully aware of the damage caused. A cleanup may require full storage formatting and software reinstallation to guarantee a malware-free system.
Still, any loss of valuable data — login credentials, credit card details and valuable files — may be irrecoverable. So what can you do to prevent a malware attack in the first place?
Standard security best practices go a long way in preventing malware attacks:
Business organizations must go a step ahead and improve their Intrusion Detection System capabilities. Use Anomaly-based detection systems that learn from patterns of attack signatures and traffic requests, model true system behavior and alert against any anomalous behavior in real-time.
Be wary of the insider threats: use strong Identity and Access Management protocols such as ABAC that strictly enforce the Principle of Least Privilege Access while maintaining flexibility to share computing resources and data between all data producers and consumers in line with organizational policies. And, lastly, don’t forget to consider your disaster recovery plan in light of a malware attack.
With the right cybersecurity strategy in place, you can likely get ahead of malware. See how Splunk can help support these efforts and strengthen your digital resilience.
This posting does not necessarily represent Splunk's position, strategies or opinion.
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