When Malware becomes Crimeware

Now, without wanting to necessarily start an official book club – there are enough in the world without me getting into the act. I have had the opportunity in the past few weeks to read a couple of security focused books that I thought you may well be interested in and benefit from.  They both focus on the evolution of ‘malware’ into ‘crimeware’.  ‘Crimeware – understanding new attacks and defences’ is by Markus Jakobsson and Zulfikar Ramzan (www.informit.com/aw).  It is very comprehensive in its scope and helps the expert, and not so expert, understand and prevent specific crimeware threats.  What is does well is to explain how, from a technical standpoint, malware can and is used for the purposes of crimeware.  Zulfikar Ramzan is a colleague of mine here at Symantec and he has also roped in some other members of the team to help with some of the chapters. 

‘Zero Day Threat’, by Byron Acohido and Jon Swartz (www.sterlingpublishing.com), provides a further insight into the developing world of crimeware.  The authors are journalists with USA Today and they neatly manage to intertwine a narrative of a real-life ‘bust’ of an author of crimeware in Canada, whilst outlining the failures of Banks and Credit Bureaus to keep people save from crimeware.  It provides a good and thought provoking overview of what is and potentially could happen, without descending into the realms of deep technical analysis.

May 28, 2008 | Filed Under Data loss, Market trends, Security, Spam 

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