Malware Traffic Could Forewarn of International Conflicts | MIT Technology Review

Malware Traffic Could Forewarn of International Conflicts | MIT Technology Review

FireEye plans to continue the research. “We can see the digital equivalent of troops on the border,” Kevin Thompson, a threat analyst for the company, told MIT Technology Review. “But we’d like to look back at a whole year of data and try to correlate with all the world events in the same period.”

Government use of malware is becoming more common, according to Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure, who studies malware made and used by nation-states. Countries of all sizes use malware because it is relatively cheap and gets results, he said during a talk at Black Hat on Wednesday. “There are parallels here to the nuclear arms race,” he said. “[But] the power of nuclear weapons was in deterrence, and we don’t have that with cyberweapons.”