For this assignment we were asked to find a Whitepaper written about a subject in our field of study and summarize it. The article I read was about the state of malware in 2017. This article talks about the trends of ransomware, ad fraud malware, and botnets.

This is my summary of the whitepaper, with the actual paper linked below:

The white paper article I read was about the state of malware in 2017. This article talks about the trends of ransomware, ad fraud malware, and botnets. One of the biggest trends was the rise of ransomware, which makes it a seamless transition for the cyber criminal to have money in their bank account, rather than multiple steps as it used to be with trojans and spyware. At times, ad fraud malware was reported to be in higher frequency than ransomware. Ad fraud is where the infected system takes over and uses itself to visit sites and give the ads multiple clicks, therefore gaining money. This type of malicious malware is also used to take over users systems completely and demand money before they have their system returned. They also talked about the rise of botnet attacks, a botnet is a network of private computers infected with malicious software used to send spam. However, with the rise of botnet attacks, it was aimed at IoT devices such as smart thermostats or home security cameras. They talk about the geography of cyber security attacks, with unsurprisingly the most being in north America and Europe.  

This article was overall very informative and eye opening to the actual amount of attacks that happen every year, and also the ever evolving and growing malware industry. There is a definite trend that will follow into 2017 with an increase of malware attacks. We need to be on the watch for malware that modifies the MBR, restricting usage of the system until payment has been received, and email phishing scams, which are by far the most stable way to distribute malware. The Internet of Things, which is essentially external smart devices like thermostats and security cameras, is a big vulnerability and with an increase of malware attacks, these need to kept under watch.