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Since the Morris Worm was released in 1988, malicious code has been identified as one of the top major threats to Internet users. At first, individuals utilized viruses and worms to crash machines and deface websites, typically for bragging rights. Today however, malicious code or malware is the primary vehicle for stealing identities and sensitive financial information that is eventually used or sold by online criminals.
With the advent of botnets, cyber criminals are now able to easily control a large amount of computers infected with malicious code in order to commit major fraud as well as more nefarious attacks. Botnet infrastructures are becoming more complex as cyber criminals are continually adding new features while creating more intricate obfuscation schemes in order to mask the identities of those that operate the bots.
As the popularity of criminal malware utilization has increased, it has become ever more important to identify the criminal perpetrators responsible for malicious code attacks. It is not enough to focus on individual malicious code incidents. Instead, it is necessary to analyze intelligence data from multiple incidents and attempt to associate this data with other know fraud datasets. This will provide a more holistic and clearly defined picture of who is responsible for utilizing and facilitating malicious code in order to commit or further online crimes. The NCFTA Malware Initiative was created in order to support this objective.
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Goals & Objectives
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The goal of NCFTA’s Malware Initiative is to gather, correlate, analyze, and disseminate intelligence data related to the attribution of cyber criminals who utilize malicious code for fraud. The Malware Initiative aims to link malicious code incidents together, generate useful statistics, identify trends and patterns, and create intelligence assessments and reports. Information and intelligence derived from this Initiative will be used to support law enforcement in its mission to identify cyber criminals and combat cyber crime in general.
Future Goals:
- Provide venue where researchers, industry experts, and government employees collaborate in order to identify the greatest threats with regard to the use of malicious code
- Help law enforcement identify key threat actors who use malicious code to facilitate cyber crime and fraud
- Educate organizations on how they are impacted by malicious code and who is targeting them
- Develop threat system that provides alerts and can be queried by industry partners
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