The Go programming language is growing in popularity after being adopted by cybercriminals to build and design malware. The amount of malware strains coded using Go has increased by almost 2,000% since 2017. These findings have confirmed the trend that malware designers are moving away from C and C++ and towards news languages such as Go.
Natalie Page, Threat Intelligence Analyst at Talion explained why rarer coding languages, such as Go, are more attractive to cybercriminals. “Utilising rare code such as Go, is an attractive and lucrative tactic due to the much higher potential success rate the techniques can provide. Currently, Golang produces a much lower detection rate against security software when compared with popular malware code languages such as C & Python, C++,” Natalie explained. “What also makes this technique extremely attractive to an adversary, is the ease at which the same code can be utilised across multiple platforms for targeting against Windows, Mac, and Linux,” she continued.
