Pierluigi Paganini November 25, 2011

It is clear that the question awaits an answer deterministic, but an assessment of the main factors that influence the “final expense”. My idea is to understand what is the magnitude of the phenomenon and the costs related to a not necessarily familiar audience .  The goal is to raise awareness in the process of developing malware, and its costs.

• What is the purpose of the malware and how it affects the final cost? Is there a direct relationship between cost and purpose?
• Is there a relationship between the cost and the vulnerability that we intend to exploit?
• Some vulnerabilities are more easily exploitable while others are in day 0 and therefore carry a greater burden of realization against a greater chance of success.
• What is the malicious agent distribution channel that will be used and what is the expected speed of propagation which has as its goal.
• Which is the relationship between the commitment (government, criminals and hackers) and the costs.

These are just few questions that we should ask ourselves approaching the topic.

The purpose surely influence the final cost and it is directly proportional to the effort required to identify vulnerabilities and analysis of target systems.

A zero-day attack is an attack that try to exploit computer application vulnerabilities that are unknown to others or to the developers.  Obviously finding a vulnerability of this type the success is guarantee of success and certainly has a different cost from that is related to the exploit of a well-documented vulnerabilities for which a lot materia is available in the literature.

The time factor is crucial for the eradication of virus. The spread should be to tight deadlines and in massive form.

The distribution channel and the target are certainly crucial in the design phase of the malware. If the goal is a pandemic, it will seek to computer systems with a general circulation, such as Microsoft. If the intent is to exploit the mobile channel then probably u iPhone OS and Android OS systems will be under attack with obvious implications in the design phase.

Just the design is the distinctive element of a malware. The greater its ability to change more effective will be its offense. How to implement these features? Basically implementing  polymorphic malware that are able to avoid most of anrivirus, or developing the agent in a scalar mode. In this case the malware will be composed by several components that modulate its behavior.

Final behaviour of the virus is the result of different modules, each with particular characteristics and built for a specific target.

Onother important feature to qualify malware and related costs is the entity that commits investment for the production of malware. If there is a government commitment it is inclined to think the development of a “cyber weapon” whose cost is the result of business intelligence, analysis, research … so very high costs.  Instead the criminal organizzations are similar to software factory, the latter sometimes better organized and more effective management of economic resources toward these goals. The basin from which it takes, is a IT underground of East Area, often with the financial resources to the east in the game is able to offer an offering worthy of the best centers of development.  Finally, there are hacker communities, with very different goals that develop at a lower cost and with no means ignoble purposes ..In this case, the value added is the knowledge of professionals that compete in their own egos.

For the first two cases there are malware factory who develop malware to order and manage them like any other real IT project.

Let’s start analyzing some data to have a idea of the huge quantity of money invested, in this specific case in military scenarios:

• US Annual military spending: $708 Billion
• US Cyber Command: $105 Million
• North Korea military spending: $5 Billion
• North Korean cyber warfare spending: $56 Million
• Iran cyber warfare spending: $76 Million

Which are the main aspects of cyberwarfare?