Thursday 17 November 2016

Number Of New Malware Variants Rises To Over 96 million

Some of the key takeaways from October’s Latest Intelligence, and therefore the threat landscape generally, embrace a explosive spike in new malware variants, spam reaching the very best rate in nearly a year, Associate in Nursing disreputable DDoS botnet, and therefore the discovery of a replacement Trojan utilized in high-level monetary attacks.

Malware
The Latest Intelligence for Oct saw the quantity of latest malware variants jump considerably, with 96.1 million distinctive variants seen.

Much of this increase are often attributed to the Kotver family of threats (Trojan.Kotver), that has seen accrued growth in activity since early August. The transaction within the click-fraud malware’s activity is being helped on by JS.Nemucod, a downloader unfold via malicious email attachments, that is dropping Kotver onto infected computers. Exploit kits and spam also are accustomed push Kotver.



October saw the Mirai botnet (Linux.Gafgyt) attain infamy once it used compromised net of Things (IoT) devices to conduct best distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, as well as one that knocked a variety of well-known websites, like Spotify, Twitter, and PayPal, offline. The botnet has applied attacks reaching up to one Tbps.

Symantec discovered Trojan.Odinaff in Oct. Attackers with ties to the Carbanak cluster used the malware in an exceedingly string of attacks against monetary targets round the globe. Symantec additionally found proof that the gang mounted attacks on SWIFT users by victimisation malware to cover customers’ own records of SWIFT messages concerning deceitful transactions.

Web attacks
The RIG exploit kit (EK) topped the charts once more in Oct because the most active EK for the second month in an exceedingly row, comprising thirty seven.4 % of all EK activity. Magnitude jumped from fourth to second place, up 0.6 proportion points over the previous month. Watching these exploit kits separately, RIG saw a sixty nine % increase in usage from September to Oct, whereas Magnitude saw a forty five % increase.

Symantec blocked up to 460,000 internet attacks per day in Oct, that is a rise over the previous month and due partially to the increase in EK activity. However, alternative factors may also have a causative result. Search engines, as an example, came vulnerable in Oct once a report found that the quantity of malicious results came in searches is continuously growing, with sixfold as several website threats found in ends up in 2016 compared to 2013.

Email
The recent U.S. election fever brought a rise in election-related spam. This was mirrored within the Latest Intelligence for Oct, with the worldwide spam rate reaching 54.1 percent, the very best rate seen since Nov 2015. enforcement continues to tackle the difficulty, however, recently transferal to justice a US-based spamming gang. The gang hacked into company servers to use them to send spam and steal worker email addresses. Over fifty million email addresses were discovered within the gang’s info once the suspects were detained.


Last month, Symantec additionally warned a few major increase within the variety of email-based attacks victimization malicious Windows Script File (WSF) attachments. Between Oct three and four, Symantec blocked quite one.3 million emails that distributed Ransom. Locky victimization this plan of action, and another 918,000 emails on Oct 5. The quantity of emails with malicious WSF attachments being blocked by Symantec has drastically up within the past many months, from 22,000 in Gregorian calendar month to over a 2.2 million in September.

It’s not all dangerous news tho' because the phishing rate for Oct small to 1 in 5,313 emails. The world with the very best phishing rate in Oct was Public Administration with one in a pair of,814 emails. Businesses with one,501-2,500 staff had the very best phishing rate in Oct with one in 3,037 emails.

Mobile
There were no new golem malware families discovered in Oct however the quantity of golem variants per family accrued to 57. Mobile malware developers appear to be taking longer to enhance existing threats instead of making fully new ones. This may be seen with variants of golem. Lock screen, that recently began employing a straightforward however effective technique to boost the chance of compromising golem devices. The new variants declare their main activity as a part of the launcher class to induce around Android's auto-start restrictions. The most part of the threat is listed as another to the default launcher app and, with a bit social engineering, the threat will trick the user into launching the malware.

Social media
Manual sharing continues to dominate social media scams, tho' it declined 11.7 proportion points in Oct to 63.55 percent. In distinction, pretend Offers accrued 10.9 proportion points throughout the month of Oct, up from 16.62 % in September to twenty seven.48 percent.

These square measure simply a couple of things that stood out throughout the month. take care to visualize out the most recent Intelligence for a lot of charts, tables, and analysis covering the threat landscape.

By: Carl Marx
Source: Symantec.com
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