Worm-like Malware Evolves To Gain Access To More Systems making this one of the more disturbing trends this year. Worms are becoming popular among the world’s hackers again.
We’ve seen a handful of new malware strains introduced in recent months with worm modules added to their code, allowing them to scan and infect Windows systems connected to the initial source of the infection.
Worm-like Malware evolves is bad news for IT Security professionals around the globe. In the early days of the internet, some of the most devastating attacks were worm-base and causing no end of trouble to organizations of all shapes and sizes. Now, it seems that today’s hackers are dusting off one of yesteryear’s favorite tactics and giving it a new lease on life. Purple Fox malware is the latest strain with a worm module attack.
Purple Fox
Purple Fox has been around a while as malware goes, with the first spotting in the wild in 2018 when it infected over 30,000 devices during the first campaign known to utilize it. As was the case then, Purple Fox isn’t damaging in and of itself but is primarily used as a dropper to deploy other, more devastating forms of malware once it gains a foothold on a target system.
Given that and the new worm-like capabilities that allow it to spread like wildfire once it gets a toehold somewhere, it should consider it dangerous indeed.
Even more worrisome is that after the initial spate of infections in 2018, the controllers of the code went relatively quiet until May of this year (2020), when Purple Fox attacks suddenly intensified, with more than 90,000 separate attacks in April and May of this year alone.
As if busy IT managers didn’t have enough to worry about, they can now add another item. Purple Fox looks like it’s here to stay.
