Ken Bechtel

In today’s chess game of malware author versus network defender, often times the last line of defense is the target itself—your security application. Malware that specifically targets host security applications has been on the rise for the last ten years.

There has been a lot of press coverage concerning the discovery of the XcodeGhost malware that affects iOS 9 and other Apple systems. This infection has caused 400 apps to be pulled from the Apple App Store so far.

In the early days of computing, virus and worm authors were not welcomed in the community of hacking. The hacking community thought of malware authorship as less challenging than finding a good vulnerability and compromising weak systems—unsavory, beneath them as something that was done by kids with no talent or skills.

On the 24th of November 2014, a major anti-malware vendor released a report concerning a long running piece of backdoor Trojan malware, now called “Regin.” We at Tenable Network Security were aware of this report on the Sunday before the release, and looked forward to reading the technical analysis.

On July 31, US-CERT released a report on a Point of Sale (POS) targeting malware called BackOff. In the last week, we’ve seen news coverage of multiple highly recognizable corporations being compromised by this threat.