Malware Developers Use Google Go Language For Attacks

Some people at Google may not be particularly happy with the development of their Go programming language. Because this has developed into the preferred tool of malware programmers in recent years.

Since 2017, the number of malware samples found using Go in their development has increased by a full 2,000 percent. This is the result of an analysis by the security company Intezer. More and more programmers working on malicious code said goodbye to the classics C and C ++, which were previously the standard tools in this area.

Google introduced Go in 2007. The first malware that was written with the programming language was discovered in 2012. However, it took some time before broader sections of the criminal scene really discovered the advantages of the language for themselves. When this happened, however, the development resembled a dam break.

There are reasons for success

The development has accelerated massively, especially in the last two years. “Before 2019, it was a rarity to come across malware written in Go, but during 2019 it suddenly became an everyday thing,” the Intezer report said. The last few months have given the matter the rest.

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There are several reasons for the enormous increase in interest in Go. The most important is certainly the fact that the language is very easy to develop code that works on different platforms. This is pretty important in times when the focus of users on a particular operating system is increasingly disappearing. Windows, macOS and Linux can now be attacked quickly in parallel with a malware code base.

In addition, the binaries compiled from Go cannot yet be translated back and analyzed as easily as is the case with C or C ++. This makes the work of security researchers more difficult and defense tools such as virus scanners cannot be optimized in terms of their detection rates so quickly.