On the Horizon: Parasitic Malware Will Feast on Critical Infrastructure

Parasitic malware, which seeks to steal processing power, has traditionally targeted computers and mobile devices. In the coming years, this type of malware will evolve to target more powerful, industrial sources of processing power such as Industrial Control Systems (ICS), cloud infrastructures, critical national infrastructure (CNI) and the IoT. The malware’s primary goal will be to feast on processing power, remaining undetected for as long as possible. Services will be significantly disrupted, becoming entirely unresponsive as they have the life sucked out of them.

At the Information Security Forum, we anticipate that unprepared organizations will have a wide, and often unmonitored, attack surface that can be targeted by parasitic malware. They will see infected devices constantly running at full capacity, raising electricity costs and compromising functionality. Systems will degrade, in some cases leading to unexpected failure that halts critical services.

Every organization will be susceptible to parasitic malware. However, environments with high power consumption (such as power stations, water and waste treatment plants and data centers) and those reliant on industrial IoT (such as computerized warehouses, automated factories and smart cities) will become enticing targets for malicious attackers as high-power consumption tends to mask the energy usage of parasitic malware.