About malware

Before we dive into the historical threat data, I need to provide you with some definitions for terms I’ll use throughout the rest of this chapter.

Malicious software, also known as malware, is software whose author’s intent is malicious. The developers of malware are trying to impede the confidentiality, integrity, and/or availability of data and/or the systems that process, transmit, and store it.

As I discussed in Chapter 1, malware authors can be motivated by many different things, including hubris, notoriety, military espionage, economic espionage, and hacktivism.

Most malware families today are blended threats. What I mean by this is that many years ago, threats were discrete—they were either a worm or a backdoor, but not both. Today, most malware has characteristics of multiple categories of malware. Analysts in anti-malware labs that reverse-engineer malware samples typically classify malware by the primary or most prominent way...