Part 3: Types Of Malware

For a complete table of contents of all the lessons please click below as it will give you a brief of each lesson in addition to the topics it will cover. https://github.com/mytechnotalent/Reverse-Engineering-Tutorial

Malware falls into several categories of which I will touch briefly upon below.

A backdoor is malicious code that embeds itself into a computer to allow a remote attacker access with very little or sometimes no authority to execute various commands on any respective local computer.

A botnet allows an attacker access to a system however receive instructions not from one remote attacker but from a command-and-control server to which can control an unlimited amount of computers at the same time.

A downloader is nothing more than malicious code that has only one purpose which is to install other malicious software. Downloaders are frequently installed when a hacker gains access to a system initially. The downloader then installs additional software to control the system.

We find information access malware which gathers information from a computer and sends it directly to a host such as a keylogger or password grabber and usually used to obtain access to various online accounts that can be very sensitive.

There are malicious programs that launch other malicious programs which use non-standard options to get increased access or a greater cloaking/hiding technique when penetrating a system.

One of the most dangerous forms of malware is the rootkit which hides the existence of itself and additional malware from the user which makes it extremely hard to locate. A rootkit can manipulate processes such as hiding their IP in an IP scan so that a user may never know that they have a direct socket to a botnet or other remote computer.

Scareware is used to trick a user into purchasing additional software to falsely protect a user when there is no real threat whatsoever that exists. Once a user pays to have the tricked software removed from the computer it then can stay resident and later emerge in an altered form.

There are also various kinds of malware that send spam from a target machine which generates income for the attacker by allowing them to sell various services to other users.

The final form of malware is that of a traditional worm or virus which copies itself and goes after other computers.

This is the end the road for now regarding our discussion of malware because we first need to go back to the beginning and understand how a computer works at it's base level.

In our next lesson we will begin our long journey into x86 Assembly Language. In order to truly understand the very basics of reverse engineering and malware we need to over the next several months take a deep dive into the core and build our way up.