![]() We queried against certificate transparency logs with the host names associated with malware Internet communications on ports other than 443, 80, and 8080, and found that 49 percent of the hosts had TLS certificates associated with them that were issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). There’s also a significant fraction of TLS communications that use an Internet Protocol port other than 443-such as malware using a Tor or SOCKS proxy over a non-standard port number. In 2020, 23 percent of malware we detected communicating with a remote system over the Internet were using TLS today, it is nearly 46 percent.Ī breakdown of malware outbound communications for the first 3 months of 2021. We’ve seen dramatic growth over the past year in malware using TLS to conceal its communications. It should come as no surprise, then, that malware operators have also been adopting TLS for essentially the same reasons: to prevent defenders from detecting and stopping deployment of malware and theft of data. ![]() According to browser data from Google, the use of HTTPS has grown from just over 40 percent of all web page visits in 2014 to 98 percent in March of 2021. Over the past decade, and particularly in the wake of revelations about mass Internet surveillance, the use of TLS has grown to cover a majority of Internet communications. The secure HTTP (HTTPS) web protocol, StartTLS email protocol, Tor anonymizing network, and virtual private networks such as those based on the OpenVPN protocol all leverage TLS to encrypt and encapsulate their contents-protecting them from being observed or modified in transit. The TLS cryptographic protocol is used to secure an ever-increasing portion of the Internet’s web, messaging and application data traffic. Transport Layer Security has been one of the greatest contributors to the privacy and security of Internet communications over the past decade.
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