According to a recent report by security firm Intezer (Year of the Gopher: 2020 Go Malware Round-Up), new malware written in the Go programming language has increased by 2000% over the past four years.
The report revealed that the Go language (sometimes referred to as Golang ) was first used to create malware about nine years ago. However, it began to become more popular among cybercriminals around 2019 .
Since then, researchers have noticed that it is becoming an increasingly popular choice for hackers , as it runs on Windows, Linux , and Mac operating systems . At the same time, it is relatively difficult for security researchers to reverse engineer .
In a blog post, the company explained that the Go programming language was used by Russian state hackers to create malware that targeted Eastern European countries with a variant of the Zebrocy last year. hackers have also used the language to develop the WellMess malware that has targeted vaccine researchers COVID-19 in the UK, Canada and the US.
Also, according to the researchers, Go malware is also used by Chinese state hackers. Recently, Go malware was used in loaders and attacks against Tibetans.
Regarding attacks in general, the security firm reported botnets (IPStorm) used to carry out DDoS attacks and cryptocurrency mining as well as ransomware variants (Nefilim, EKANS), written in the Go programming language.
Intezer concludes that specialized runtime protection tools will be needed to address the growing threat of Go malware.
“We have seen cybercriminals target multiple operating systems with malware from the same Go codebase. Traditional antivirus programs have difficulty detecting Go malware due to several factors,” the company said.
Researchers also believe that attacks Go malware will increase as more valuable data is moved to the cloud.
Source: Infosecurity Magazine
