And Now There’s MaaS: “Malware as a Service!”
The cyber arms race just got crazier. You’ve heard of SaaS…DaaS… now there’s MaaS – “Malware as a Service.” This means cybercrooks are figuring out tricks to make the life of anti-virus heros much harder.
The UK’s National Crime Agency recently announced the arrest of two people in England, a man and a woman, both 22 years old, on charges related to running a malware testing service. Loosely speaking, this is a service like Google’s VirusTotal, except that instead of helping users to draw the attention of the research community to potential new virus threats, these folks created a service just for other cybercrooks.
Their idea was that you can privately test new variants of malware you have created and then test versions against an array of anti-virus products, all in secret. This way the creator could get an idea of how well the new malware might do out in the wild, all without needing to keep pirated versions of every anti-virus product up to date.
Paul Ducklin gets into some more meaty details. Click here to check his article out. It’s worth the read.
