Curiosity is bliss

New breeds of malware

Here are two kinds malware that caught my attention recently, which I had never thought about:

• World of Warcraft password stealing trojan (via Bruce Schneier), most likely to make money off of selling the virtual goods,
• "Ransomware" (via Wired), encrypting valuable files on the infected machine and selling the decryption keys.

These fit the trend of the last couple of years, the rise of profit as a motive for attacks. Profit definitely changes the threat modelling picture: for example, the traditional threat of sensitive documents being leaked or deleted morphs into extortion. I guess the mitigation stays the same in that case though: make backups.
I wonder what other kind of wacky or imaginative attacks hackers are coming up with these days and we may not even know anything about yet.

Posted by Julien on September 07, 2005. Permalink