Lately I’ve been doing a bit of research into malware trends (mostly from the smartphone perspective) — but via PaulDotCom Security Weekly episode 52, I found a few items related to malware that were particularly interesting.
The first item is a whitepaper from John Canavan of Symantec. The paper, is titled Me code write good: The l33t skillz of the virus writer and provides several examples of flaws found in past/current malware samples. In some instances, this malware is flawed to the extent that it is either more or less destructive than the author intended - or it is, in effect, impotent. Further, some malware contains vulnerabilities which can be exploited. While we’ve always known that *all* code is generally flawed, it is interesting to think about code that exploits vulnerabilities being vulnerable to exploits.
The second item is a stealth malware taxonomy being developed by Joanna Rutkowska of COSEINC Advanced Malware Labs. The paper is extremely readable and interesting. Joanna also has several papers related to malware, rootkits, and kernel security available at http://invisiblethings.org/papers.html. Good stuff.
Thanks to the guys from PaulDotCom for finding and posting this info.
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