Giovanni Vigna, Computer Science Professor and Lastline CTO, describes how his security research lab seized an active cybercrime botnet from a Russian gang to study malware monetization strategies.
“We even captured once an entire botnet. We stole it from the Russian cybercrime gang, and we ran it for a while to understand what information we would collect, and then we wrote a paper on it, because that's what we do.”
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More from Giovanni Vigna
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Giovanni Vigna's study found no antivirus consistently detects day-one malware
“Actually, there was, in a year that we did the study, there was never one single antivirus that was able always to get the sample the first day.”
Lastline processes 750,000 malware samples per day, requiring accelerated analysis
“You cannot execute a thousand, a hundred, or in our case, 750,000 samples a day, ah, for an hour, because the computing power would be enormous and incredibly expensive, so you have to speed it up.”
Giovanni Vigna says perfect malware detection is mathematically impossible
“So it's impossible really to understand what a program does. So we will always only have heuristics and never the final algorithm that is able to tell this is a good program and this is a bad program.”
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