A polymorphic engine (sometimes called mutation engine or mutating engine) is a

software component A software component is a modular unit of software that encapsulates specific functionality. The desired characteristics of a component are reusability and maintainability. Value Components allow software development to assemble software ...

that uses polymorphic code to alter the payload while preserving the same functionality. Polymorphic

engines An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power gen ...

are used almost exclusively in

malware Malware (a portmanteau of ''malicious software'')Tahir, R. (2018)A study on malware and malware detection techniques . ''International Journal of Education and Management Engineering'', ''8''(2), 20. is any software intentionally designed to caus ...

, with the purpose of being harder for

antivirus software Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name ...

to detect. They do so either by encrypting or obfuscating the malware payload. One common deployment is a

file binder File binders are utility software that allow a user to "bind" multiple files together, resulting in a single executable. They are commonly used by Hacker (computer security), hackers to insert other programs such as Trojan horse (computing), Troja ...

that weaves malware into normal files, such as office documents. Since this type of malware is usually polymorphic, it is also known as a '' polymorphic packer''. The engine of the Virut

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more Internet bot, bots. Botnets can be used to perform distributed denial-of-service attack, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send Spamming, sp ...

is an example of a polymorphic engine.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Polymorphic Engine Types of malware