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2015: THE YEAR OF THE RAT – THREAT REPORT

Reflecting on the Sony Pictures Entertainment Breach

While the Chinese Zodiac calls 2015 the “Year of the Sheep” (how apropos), I predict that 2015

will be the Year of the Remote Access Trojan (RAT). It all started in November, 2014, when
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) was hacked. Many speculated it was a ‘malicious insider’

but the facts show it was something very different and something you should expect when you
least expect it.

Let’s take a quick look at the SPE attack and realize that it’s the tip of the iceberg for what’s
coming our way in 2015. If you don’t take actions and head my warnings to get more proactive
in protecting your personal privacy (see: http://www.snoopwall.com/halting-hackers-on-the-

holidays/) and also in your business environment, avoid being phished and infected with RATs,
then you might actually be one of the sheep losing your fleece in 2015.

How Sony Pictures Entertainment Was Hacked – Maliciously From the Outside

The story is an ‘internal administrative’ password was
used to take down Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).
That is a tiny piece of the real story. It’s easy to get an

admin password, especially when it’s stored in a file
called “Usernames&Passwords” in clear text on an
adjacent system in the same computer network, if you’ve

already deployed a RAT.

Antivirus is Dead
The first problem is that so many computers throughout the globe are infected with zero-day

(new) malware. In fact, when NTT tested the top antivirus products for a year, in their recent
report, they concluded that between 50-70% of the malware made it passed their antivirus

scanners. That means, and I’ve been saying this for years, that Antivirus is dead.

Just look at this May 4, 2014 Wall Street Journal article, where Symantec's senior vice president

for information security, Brian Dye, told the Wall Street Journal that antivirus "is dead." If you

20 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2014 Edition
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