While vampires, ghouls and goblins may be enough to scare some of our readers, zero-day exploits, ransomware, and costly data breaches are guaranteed to send chills down any CISO's spine. To ensure you have a proper Halloween scare, SC spoke with a few industry professionals about some of the spookiest malware they've encountered.
6. EternalBlue:
STEALTHbits Technologies Chief Technologies Officer Jonathan Sander
“Technically, it's more of an exploit than a piece of malware, but it's been in so much malware it deserves a spot on any list like this. Like so many movie monsters, it starts out in a government lab and is broken out by some criminals. Once it was out, it infected tons of victims through many types of horrors. It was the core of WannaCry, NotPetya, and more. It uses a scary flaw in Windows to spread itself far and wide once it worms its way in, and once it was married with other malware it became more deadly than any drive in monster ever was.”
5. CCleaner
Don Duncan (NuData) Customer Success Engineer
“The stuff was already preinstalled on ‘haunted hardware' when the customer purchased it. The one thing that caught my attention was that it was shipped with new hardware. By the way, I was one of those effected having just bought a new Android device. It didn't stop me from buying the newest version of the phone though. Buying new doesn't necessarily protect you from malware."
4. Cryptolocker
FireMon Platform Specialist for Immediate Insight Josh Mayfield
“This Trojan has learned how to automate social engineering functions to dissect who you are and who you will be open to accept. Imagine I am a friend from college who looks you up on LinkedIn and notices that you're the Director of Marketing at ABC Company. I hit you up with a message on social media, with my email address asking to get in touch about opportunities. From there, I scrape the job board from your company and grab the link to one of the posts. I send you an email with my resume and link to portfolio, telling you that I'm a good candidate for the role. Naturally, you click the link to download my resume and….deploy ransomware. Its ability to cloak itself and leverage social engineering is what makes it so potent in a socially driven ecosystem.”
3. NotPetya:
Positive Technologies Cybersecurity Resilience Lead Leigh-Anne Galloway
“It's packed with such a diverse toolkit that it can infect and spread even on up-to-date systems. It has the ability to snowball, infecting one computer after another. This allows the ransomware to also compromise the domain controller, and even gain control of all hosts on a domain, resulting in a full compromise of infrastructure.”
2. Stuxnet
Rubicon Labs Chief Product Officer Rod Schultz
“The spookiest malware I've seen is Stuxnet. This malware was not a pandemic attack on smart phones or PCs, instead it was a blueprint for how a sophisticated and incredibly effective digital weapon can be constructed for pinpoint destruction. Through its construction, the United States and Israel have effectively done the equivalent of what A.Q. Kahn has done to illicit nuclear proliferation, and the world will never be the same. Pandora's Box has been blown wide open, the world knows what steps are needed to digitally attack an enemy, and it's only a question of time before those steps are reproduced to haunt critical United States infrastructure.”
1. WannaCry
Positive Technologies Cybersecurity Resilience Lead Leigh-Anne Galloway
“The mass ransomware attack by WannaCry was caused by a very simple and common bad habit: using outdated and unpatched versions of software. This is the scariest factor about the WannaCry case, since many users neglect updating their systems. In general, scenarios of attacks on corporate information systems stemming from the exploitation of vulnerabilities in outdated software are extremely common. In fact, it's one of the most common security weaknesses. WannaCry can be used as a weapon destroying not a physical enemy, but very important and even confidential data -- from personal information all the way up to the government level. Additionally, encrypting enterprise data can result in significant financial losses for businesses and customers alike. The cryptoworm can also interfere with transportation systems, causing very dangerous scenarios.”
