The Use of the Modern Social Web by Malicious Software

Malicious software thrives in the richness of the social web ecosystem, which incorporates mobile devices, reliable networks, powerful browsers and sociable users. Modern malware is programmed to take full advantage of these elements, which are especially potent in the context of social media and social networking websites. As the result, we’re seeing malware exhibit the following characteristics:

Using social networking sites to remotely direct malicious tools and attackers’ actions
Controlling social media content to provide attackers with financial and political rewards
Distributing links on websites with social capabilities to for autonomous malware propagation
Defrauding participants of the social web by using chat bots and other techniques

I created a brief presentation how malicious software makes use of these techniques to thrive on the social web and to offer lucrative benefits to malware authors and operators. If this is interesting to you, download my presentation, complete with full speaker notes and references (PDF).

You might also want to tune into the free SANS webcast where I presented an earlier version of this briefing. The benefit of listening to this recording is that you’ll also hear the perspective of Dasient’s Neil Daswani on other ways in which malware thrives on the web ecosystem.

— Lenny Zeltser