Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: What is malware?
Malware (a portmanteau for malicious software) is any software intentionally designed to cause damage to a computer, server, client, or computer network.[1] Malware does the damage after it is implanted or introduced in some way into a target's computer and can take the form of executable code, scripts, active content, and other software.[2] The code is described as computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, ransomware, spyware, adware, and scareware, among other terms. Malware has a malicious intent, acting against the interest of the computer user—and so does not include software that causes unintentional harm due to some deficiency, which is typically described as a software bug.
In this context, and throughout, what is called the "system" under attack may be anything from a single application, through a complete computer and operating system, to a large network. Various factors make a system more vulnerable to malware:
macOS malware includes viruses, trojan horses, worms and other types of malware that affect macOS, Apple's current operating system for Macintosh computers. macOS (previously Mac OS X and OS X) rarely suffers malware or virus attacks, and has been considered less vulnerable than Windows. There is a frequent release of system software updates to resolve vulnerabilities. Utilities are also available to find and remove malware.
IObit Malware Fighter (introduced in 2004) is an anti-malware and anti-virus program for the Microsoft Windows operating system (Windows XP and later). It is designed to remove and protect against malware, including Trojans, rootkits, and ransomware.
The most common evasion technique is when the malware evades analysis and detection by fingerprinting the environment when executed.[38] The second most common evasion technique is confusing automated tools' detection methods. This allows malware to avoid detection by technologies such as signature-based antivirus software by changing the server used by the malware.[39] The third most common evasion technique is timing-based evasion. This is when malware runs at certain times or following certain actions taken by the user, so it executes during certain vulnerable periods, such as during the boot process, while remaining dormant the rest of the time. The fourth most common evasion technique is done by obfuscating internal data so that automated tools do not detect the malware.[40] An increasingly common technique is adware that uses stolen certificates to disable anti-malware and virus protection; technical remedies are available to deal with the adware.[41]
Dasient's Web Malware Analysis Platform uses a dynamic, behavioral-based engine - based on sophisticated algorithms and anomaly detection technology - to defend against the latest attacks using up-to-date intelligence about malware. This platform includes a system of highly instrumented virtual machines to simulate what actual users would experience when visiting a particular web page or viewing a specific online ad.
They can provide real time protection against the installation of malware software on a computer. This type of malware protection works the same way as that of antivirus protection in that the anti-malware software scans all incoming network data for malware and blocks any threats it comes across. Anti-malware software programs can be used solely for detection and removal of malware software that has already been installed onto a computer. This type of anti-malware software scans the contents of the Windows registry, operating system files, and installed programs on a computer and will provide a list of any threats found, allowing the user to choose which files to delete or keep, or to compare this list to a list of known malware components, removing files that match.[50]
Malware analysis is the study or process of determining the functionality, origin and potential impact of a given malware sample such as a virus, worm, trojan horse, rootkit, or backdoor. Malware or malicious software is any computer software intended to harm the host operating system or to steal sensitive data from users, organizations or companies. Malware may include software that gathers user information without permission.
Generic signatures are signatures that are specific to certain behaviour rather than a specific item of malware. Most new malware is not totally novel, but is a variation on earlier malware, or contains code from one or more earlier examples of malware. Thus the results of previous analysis can be used against new malware.
Unlike other anti-malware applications available for Mac OS X (and other systems), MacScan scans exclusively for malware that affects Macs, as opposed to scanning for all forms of known threats, which would include Windows malware. Given that there is considerably less Mac-based malware than Windows-based malware, MacScan's definition files are smaller and more optimized.
CEO Marcin Kleczynski states that the Malwarebytes engine has an advantage over many of the traditional antivirus programs because it was developed in 2008, when many of the others were developed in the late 1990s and had little idea of what malware would look like 15 years down the line. He states that this makes it "easier for us to adapt as malware evolves". "The New York Times" describes their system as a "hybrid of heuristics, behavior and a signature engine that is designed to detect and block malware that other vendors can't detect". According to Dean Takahashi of "VentureBeat", Malwarebytes complements other antivirus software from vendors such as Symantec and McAfee, with the anti-malware working with the anti-virus software to attack the problem from "different directions". He remarked that Malwarebytes "cleans off machines that are already infected", while "the pro version stops your machine from getting infected in the first place".
As Mocmex can be described as a serious virus, protection is not hard. First of all, it is important to update your antivirus software, as updated antivirus works unless the malware writers get ahead of the antivirus vendors (which is what happened with the new Mocmex). Another way is to check a digital photo frame for malware on a Macintosh or Linux machine before plugging it into a computer with Windows, or disable autorun on Windows.
A new sophisticated point-of-sale or memory-scraping malware called “Multigrain” was discovered on April 17, 2016 by the FireEye Inc. security company. Multigrain malware comes under the family of NewposThings Malware. This malware is similar to the NewposThings, FrameworkPOS and BernhardPOS malware which were known previously as notorious malware.
PunkeyPOS is a new type of Point of Sale Malware which was recently discovered by PandaLabs. This new Point of Sale Malware infects the Point of Sale(POS) Systems with two types of malware applications - keylogger and RAM Scraper. PunkeyPOS gets installed into the computer automatically without the knowledge of the user, in a similar manner as other POS malware. 
One strategy for protecting against malware is to prevent the malware software from gaining access to the target computer. For this reason, antivirus software, firewalls and other strategies are used to help protect against the introduction of malware, in addition to checking for the presence of malware and malicious activity and recovering from attacks.[4]
The term of `stegomalware' was introduced by researchers in the context of mobile malware and presented at Inscrypt conference in 2014. However, the fact that (mobile) malware could potentially utilize steganography was already presented in earlier works: the use of steganography in malware was first applied to botnets communicating over probabilistically unobservable channels, mobile malware based on covert channels was proposed in the same year. Steganography was later applied to other components of malware engineering such as return-oriented programming and compile-time obfuscation, among others.
Flame is an uncharacteristically large program for malware at 20 megabytes. It is written partly in the Lua scripting language with compiled C++ code linked in, and allows other attack modules to be loaded after initial infection. The malware uses five different encryption methods and an SQLite database to store structured information. The method used to inject code into various processes is stealthy, in that the malware modules do not appear in a listing of the modules loaded into a process and malware memory pages are protected with READ, WRITE and EXECUTE permissions that make them inaccessible by user-mode applications. The internal code has few similarities with other malware, but exploits two of the same security vulnerabilities used previously by Stuxnet to infect systems. The malware determines what antivirus software is installed, then customises its own behaviour (for example, by changing the filename extensions it uses) to reduce the probability of detection by that software. Additional indicators of compromise include mutex and registry activity, such as installation of a fake audio driver which the malware uses to maintain persistence on the compromised system.
Malware authors target bugs, or loopholes, to exploit. A common method is exploitation of a buffer overrun vulnerability, where software designed to store data in a specified region of memory does not prevent more data than the buffer can accommodate being supplied. Malware may provide data that overflows the buffer, with malicious executable code or data after the end; when this payload is accessed it does what the attacker, not the legitimate software, determines.
The following is a partial list of known Linux malware. However, few if any are in the wild, and most have been rendered obsolete by Linux updates or were never a threat. Known malware is not the only or even the most important threat: new malware or attacks directed to specific sites can use vulnerabilities previously unknown to the community or unused by malware.
In 2008 the quantity of malware targeting Linux was noted as increasing. Shane Coursen, a senior technical consultant with Kaspersky Lab, said at the time, "The growth in Linux malware is simply due to its increasing popularity, particularly as a desktop operating system ... The use of an operating system is directly correlated to the interest by the malware writers to develop malware for that OS."
Anti-malware works by scanning files an network connections for known signatures. Those signatures can never be up to date. To be able to scan network connections, encryptions (SSL/TLS) need to be bypassed or even broken by anti-malware software. When monitoring emails anti-malware opens all attachments for analysis, a bug in this scanner can be used as a starting point for malware. Attackers just need to send malware to a mailbox that is scanned automatically.
MalwareMustDie, NPO as a whitehat security research workgroup, has been launched from August 2012. MalwareMustDie is a registered Nonprofit organization as a media for IT professionals and security researchers gathered to form a work flow to reduce malware infection in the internet. The group is known of their malware analysis blog. They have a list of Linux malware research and botnet analysis that they have completed. The team communicates information about malware in general and advocates for better detection for Linux malware.
What makes this virus worth mentioning is that it illustrates how easily scripting platforms, extensibility, plug-ins, ActiveX, etc, can be abused. All too often, this is forgotten in the pursuit to match features with another vendor... The ability for malware to survive in a cross-platform, cross-application environment has particular relevance as more and more malware is pushed out via Web sites. How long until someone uses something like this to drop a JavaScript infecter on a Web server, regardless of platform?
In its earlier years, Mac OS X enjoyed a near-absence of the types of malware and spyware that have affected Microsoft Windows users. macOS has a smaller usage share compared to Windows, but it also has traditionally more secure Unix roots. Worms, as well as potential vulnerabilities, were noted in 2006, which led some industry analysts and anti-virus companies to issue warnings that Apple's Mac OS X is not immune to malware. Increasing market share coincided with additional reports of a variety of attacks. In early 2011, Mac OS X experienced a large increase in malware attacks, and malware such as Mac Defender, MacProtector, and MacGuard were seen as an increasing problem for Mac users. At first, the malware installer required the user to enter the administrative password, but later versions were able to install without user input. Initially, Apple support staff were instructed not to assist in the removal of the malware or admit the existence of the malware issue, but as the malware spread, a support document was issued. Apple announced an OS X update to fix the problem. An estimated 100,000 users were affected. Apple releases security updates for macOS on a regular basis, as well as signature files for Xprotect, an anti-malware feature part of File Quarantine present since Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
What was also noted was the message the malware left on systems it compromised.
The message left on systems compromised by Hajime displayed on terminals is shown below.