Malware

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Malware (a portmanteau of malicious software)[1] is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, deprive access to information, or which unknowingly interferes with the user's computer security and privacy.[1][2][3][4][5] Researchers tend to classify malware into one or more sub-types (i.e. computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, rogue software, wipers and keyloggers).[1]

Malware poses serious problems to individuals and businesses on the Internet.[6][7] According to Symantec's 2018 Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR), malware variants number has increased to 669,947,865 in 2017, which is twice as many malware variants as in 2016.[8] Cybercrime, which includes malware attacks as well as other crimes committed by computer, was predicted to cost the world economy US$6 trillion in 2021, and is increasing at a rate of 15% per year.[9] Since 2021, malware has been designed to target computer systems that run critical infrastructure such as the electricity distribution network.[10]

The defense strategies against malware differ according to the type of malware but most can be thwarted by installing antivirus software, firewalls, applying regular patches, securing networks from intrusion, having regular backups and isolating infected systems. Malware can be designed to evade antivirus software detection algorithms.[8]

  1. ^ a b c Tahir, R. (2018). A study on malware and malware detection techniques. Archived 10 January 2023 at the Wayback Machine. International Journal of Education and Management Engineering, 8(2), 20.
  2. ^ "An Undirected Attack Against Critical Infrastructure" (PDF). United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team(Us-cert.gov). Archived (PDF) from the original on 24 December 2016. Retrieved 28 September 2014.
  3. ^ Cani, Andrea; Gaudesi, Marco; Sanchez, Ernesto; Squillero, Giovanni; Tonda, Alberto (24 March 2014). "Towards automated malware creation". Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. SAC '14. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 157–160. doi:10.1145/2554850.2555157. ISBN 978-1-4503-2469-4. S2CID 14324560.
  4. ^ Brewer, Ross (1 September 2016). "Ransomware attacks: detection, prevention and cure". Network Security. 2016 (9): 5–9. doi:10.1016/S1353-4858(16)30086-1. ISSN 1353-4858. Archived from the original on 10 April 2019. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  5. ^ Zhong, Fangtian; Chen, Zekai; Xu, Minghui; Zhang, Guoming; Yu, Dongxiao; Cheng, Xiuzhen (2022). "Malware-on-the-Brain: Illuminating Malware Byte Codes with Images for Malware Classification". IEEE Transactions on Computers. 72 (2): 438–451. arXiv:2108.04314. doi:10.1109/TC.2022.3160357. ISSN 0018-9340. S2CID 236965755. Archived from the original on 2 September 2022. Retrieved 2 September 2022.
  6. ^ Kim, Jin-Young; Bu, Seok-Jun; Cho, Sung-Bae (1 September 2018). "Zero-day malware detection using transferred generative adversarial networks based on deep autoencoders". Information Sciences. 460–461: 83–102. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2018.04.092. ISSN 0020-0255. S2CID 51882216. Archived from the original on 23 June 2020. Retrieved 2 December 2021.
  7. ^ Razak, Mohd Faizal Ab; Anuar, Nor Badrul; Salleh, Rosli; Firdaus, Ahmad (1 November 2016). "The rise of "malware": Bibliometric analysis of malware study". Journal of Network and Computer Applications. 75: 58–76. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2016.08.022. Archived from the original on 26 June 2022. Retrieved 30 April 2022.
  8. ^ a b Xiao, Fei; Sun, Yi; Du, Donggao; Li, Xuelei; Luo, Min (21 March 2020). "A Novel Malware Classification Method Based on Crucial Behavior". Mathematical Problems in Engineering. 2020: 1–12. doi:10.1155/2020/6804290. ISSN 1024-123X.
  9. ^ Morgan, Steve (13 November 2020). "Cybercrime To Cost The World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025". Cybercrime magazine website. Cybersecurity ventures. Archived from the original on 5 March 2022. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
  10. ^ Eder-Neuhauser, Peter; Zseby, Tanja; Fabini, Joachim (1 June 2019). "Malware propagation in smart grid networks: metrics, simulation and comparison of three malware types". Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques. 15 (2): 109–125. doi:10.1007/s11416-018-0325-y. ISSN 2263-8733. S2CID 255164530.