A team of IT consultants has engineered a way of hiding malware in sentences that read like English language spam. Breakthrough paper shows hackers could evade antivirus protection by hiding malicious code in sentences that read like English language spam. The work is a breakthrough because current IT security techniques work on the assumption that the code used in code-injection attacks, where it is delivered and run on victims’ computers, has a different structure to non-executable plain data, such as English prose. One of the researchers, Dr Josh Mason of John Hopkins University, Baltimore, said the team wanted to broaden its understanding of how malicious code could be deployed, and highlight the need to design more efficient techniques for preventing this kind of attack altogether.
