>> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the course.
In the last video, we went
through the introduction to the course,
we talked about some of the prerequisites.
Again, you just want to have a foundational knowledge
>> of computers and how they work along with
>> operating systems file structures,
and also be mindful of
some basic computer networking seeker
so you can fully understand some of
the things we're going through
>> in this particular course.
>> In this video, we're going to
take a brief introduction to malware,
I want to stress very brief,
just to give you some highlights
>> or some terminology and some key points that
>> we're going to make throughout the course.
What is malware? Malware just stands for
malicious software and there's
>> several variants of that.
>> You'll see the media will talk about
malware a lot and we're going to go
through this list here,
then some of these are not actually malware,
they're just ways to do attacks.
A virus is the first one up and
most people are familiar with that,
and unfortunately, the media a lot of
times will call, Trojans,
etc., viruses, but they're not actually that,
but they'll name that that way.
Just understand that a virus is similar
>> to a human virus.
>> We have the flu or something like that,
it needs a host to survive,
a virus needs a host.
As an example, with the flu,
if I cough and sneeze on you,
I'm currently hosting the virus and now I'm doing
the user interaction part
of putting the virus towards you.
When we think of computer viruses,
it needs a user interactions.
Maybe somebody clicking on a link in an email,
somebody installing some free software
that actually contains a virus in it,
those are the types of ways,
but it needs that human interaction to
actually propagate across the systems.
Now when we talk about worms, they're self-propagating.
What we mean by that is they can spread themselves,
they don't need me to click a link,
a worm can actually spread itself.
Some notable ones in the past or things like
SQL Slammer, the I love you,
the MS Blaster, and then of course,
who can forget Stuxnet from back in 2010, I believe.
Next up, Trojans.
You'll hear about like banking Trojans and
that stuff out in news articles.
These also need some user interaction.
>> Again, that's clicking a link in an email
>> or visiting a website that's infected.
A lot of times, when you do the
websites that are infected,
and you visit those, they'll do a pop-up that'll say,
"Oh, your antivirus has found a virus on your computer.
Click this link to solve all your problems."
Of course, that link is malicious and it's
going to download something, just be mindful of that.
If you are somebody out there
that's not in security industry
just watching this course,
just be mindful of those things.
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Many of the pieces of malware
out there nowadays are actually hybrids,
I'll combine like a Trojan, virus
or a worm or something like that,
and so there are hybrid things.
You'll see that a lot with botnets.
They use different forms of malware
to take over your computer
and then plug it into their master botnet,
and why is botnets are rented out
to other criminal hackers out there?
The mirror botnet is one
that most people know about because it took down
a good part of the Internet for a period of
time using IoT devices.
Ransomware is something you'll
definitely hear about in the media, and in fact,
as I'm filming this course,
there was a recent attack on the Louisiana government,
but there's been many hospital
in healthcare-related attacks,
many government attacks,
>> as well on government agencies.
>> Ransomware is just nasty.
It's encrypting your data, encrypting
your file so you can't access those.
You see it can become a very big problem when we're
talking about things like government agencies
as well as health care where it can actually block you
>> from performing patient care.
>> Some notable ones out there
and there's many of them out there.
WannaCry and Locky were some notable ones that you
probably have heard of from different media outlets.
Fileless malware, which it's really not malware,
it's just a different way to attack.
What this is doing is it's
actually launching the malware in memory.
It's just running it in memory and not
actually doing it at the file level
where anti-malware solutions can actually find it.
It's using things like a register keys
or API scheduled task.
Some estimates out there that they're showing,
>> roughly 50 percent or
>> more of the malware attacks
out there are actually Fileless around this time.
Malvertising, this is just drive by downloads,
and it's using reputable sources,
like you go to New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal and you're getting hit
with these malvertising attacks.
Some of them are just as simple as trying
to get you to click a link to download something,
other ones are actually executing code on
your system without any user interaction.
I can tell you that the reason
I go to new sites and I use
a virtual machine is because
I've been a victim in the past of malvertising.
Just keep that in mind.
Next up, we have adware.
This is an older thing,
you might see this out there for using
like freeware and stuff.
But this is an older type of attack out there.
It's just those little pop-ups you would get on
your local system there
>> and also in your browser as well.
>> Finally, we have spyware.
This is going to be your covert
monitoring type of software.
Behind the scenes, you don't recognize it as going on.
A lot of times,
>> it'll harvest your browsing information.
>> So as I visit different websites, you're capturing that.
It might do screen captures as well.
One of the common things is going to be stealing
your credentials like the banking Trojans.
That's a form of spyware that's going
to steal your credentials, and then,
of course, capturing your email data as well,
seeing who you email, etc.
In this video,
we just did a brief introduction to malware.
The next video, we're going to go
ahead and jump into our first lab,
we're going to create an executable file,
and then we're going to analyze that file.