Research detects dangerous malware hiding in peripherals

Research detects dangerous malware hiding in peripherals: A Berlin researcher has demonstrated the capability to detect previously undetectable stealthy malware that resides in graphics and network cards.Patrick Stewins proof of concept demonstrated that a detector could be built to find the sophisticated malware that ran on dedicated devices and attacked direct memory access DMA.

The attacks launched by the malware dubbed DAGGER targeted host runtime memory using DMA provided to hardware devices. These attacks were not within scope of antimalware systems and therefore not detected.DAGGER, also developed by Stewin and Iurii Bystrov of the FGSect Technical University of Berlin research group, attacked 32bit and 64bit Windows and Linux systems and could bypass memory address randomisation.

After beginning life last year as a keylogger, DAGGER has recently been upgraded with new functionality and now included the ability to update its attack behaviour during runtime via an out-of-band channel.