From veronicavaleros.com
In the last three decades there have been significant changes in the cybercrime world in terms of organization, type of attacks, and tools. Remote Access Trojans (RAT) are an intrinsic part of traditional cybercriminal activities but they have become a standard tool in advanced espionage and scams attacks. The overly specialized research in our community on Remote Access Trojans has resulted in a seemingly lack of general perspective and understanding on how RATs have evolved as a phenomenon. This work presents a new generalist perspective on Remote Access Trojans, an analysis of their growth in the last 30 years, and a discussion on how they have become a commodity in the last decade. We found that the amount of RATs increased drastically in the last ten years and that nowadays they have become standardized commodity products that are no very different from each other