BotNet News

Malware is software that infiltrates your device without your consent, causes damage or steals data. It’s behind the massive data breaches that compromise your personal information and corporate secrets.

Infections range from pop-up ads to ransomware. In fact, malware is at the root of every cyberattack. It’s also the reason why many people and businesses suffer the consequences of identity theft, fraud, extortion, lost productivity, and data exposure.

Hackers use malware to gain unauthorized access to computer systems for financial gains, international espionage and even for destructive cyberwarfare. It’s a common threat to Windows, Mac, and mobile devices. It may target physical hardware like smart home devices or networks of connected servers and workstations, or it may be aimed at specific functions such as stealing banking passwords to commit identity theft or cryptomining to generate illicit revenue from digital mining.

The first malware outbreaks began with viruses that spread by floppy disks to Apple II systems in 1982. Then in the 1990s, hackers created macro-based malware programs that infected Microsoft Word documents and spread across Windows systems. Later, there were worms that exploited vulnerabilities in network servers to attack and spread on their own. And then instant messaging based worms that exploded on AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Messenger in the mid to late 2000s.

Regardless of how they’re deployed, most types of malware are designed to take advantage of weaknesses in your device or its ecosystem. They can crack weak passwords, pierce the perimeter to breach internal IT systems, harvest data from RAM (ransomware), infect devices with adware, or act as backdoors to gain unauthorized access to the host.