Mobile malware growth double in Asia: McAfee Labs Report
McAfee Inc. has released its McAfee Labs Threats Report: June 2017 which examines the origins and inner workings of the Fareit password stealer, provides a review of the 30-year history of evasion techniques used by malware authors, explains the nature of steganography as an evasion technique, assesses reported attacks across industries, and reveals growth trends in malware, ransomware, mobile malware, and other threats in Q1 2017.
According to the findings of the report,
· Mobile malware growth doubles in Asia, contributing to a 57% increase in global infection rates.
· Total mobile malware grew 79% in the past four quarters to 16.7 million samples
· Total Mac OS malware samples grew 53% in Q1 driven by adware glut
· New ransomware rebounded in Q1 primarily due to Congur-Android OS attacks
· Total ransomware grew 59% in past four quarters to 9.6 million samples
· 301 publicly disclosed security incidents in Q1, an increase of 53% over Q4
· The health, public, and education sectors comprised more than 50% of total incidents
Fareit, now the most infamous password-stealing malware, spreads through mechanisms such as phishing emails, DNS poisoning, and exploit kits. McAfee Labs suspects that Fareit also downloaded advanced threats such as Onion Duke and Vawtrak onto the victims’ systems to carry out further attacks. McAfee Labs sees network steganography as the newest form of this discipline, as unused fields within the TCP/IP protocol headers are used to hide data. This method is on the rise because attackers can send an unlimited amount of information through the network using this technique.
“There are hundreds, if not thousands, of anti-security, anti-sandbox, and anti-analyst evasion techniques employed by malware authors, and many of them can be purchased off the shelf from the Dark Web,” said Vincent Weafer, Vice-President, McAfee Labs. “This quarter’s report reminds us that deception has evolved from simple threats on a set of simple systems, to complex threats across a wide variety of systems, to entirely new paradigms such as machine learning,” he added further.
In the first quarter of 2017, the McAfee Labs Global Threat Intelligence network registered notable trends in cyberthreat growth and cyber-attack incidents across industries:
· New threats: In Q1 2017, there were 244 new threats every minute, or more than four every second.
· Security incidents: McAfee Labs counted 301 publicly disclosed security incidents in Q1, an increase of 53% over the Q4 2016 count. The health, public, and education sectors comprised more than 50% of the total.
· Malware: New malware samples rebounded in Q1 to 32 million. The total number of malware samples increased 22% in the past four quarters to 670 million known samples. New malware counts rebounded to the quarterly average seen during the past four years.
· Mobile malware: Mobile malware reports from Asia doubled in Q1, contributing to a 57% increase in global infection rates. Total mobile malware grew 79% in the past four quarters to 16.7 million samples. The largest contributor to this growth was Android/SMSreg, a potentially unwanted program detection from India.
· MacOS malware: During the past three quarters, new Mac OS malware has been boosted by a glut of adware. Although still small compared with Windows threats, the total number of Mac OS malware samples grew 53% in Q1.
· Ransomware: New ransomware samples rebounded in Q1 primarily due to Congur ransomware attacks on Android OS devices. The number of total ransomware samples grew 59% in the past four quarters to 9.6 million known samples.
· Spam botnets: In April, the mastermind behind the Kelihos botnet was arrested in Spain. Kelihos was responsible over many years for millions of spam messages that carried banking malware and ransomware. The US Department of Justice acknowledged international cooperation between the United States and foreign authorities, the Shadow Server Foundation, and industry vendors.
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