'Blackhole' Exploit Toolkits Increasingly Targeting Users

Security experts at the security firm AVG recently released their first quarterly report of the company for the year 2011. According to the report, an online attack tool namely Blackhole has emerged into the market during the first part of the year (2011) and is being utilized for launching large-scale attacks.

AVG stated that, the Blackhole Exploit Kit, which is utilized to target vulnerabilities and enable an attacking machine access to a vulnerable system, has become a preferred tool of cybercrooks.

The usage of the Blackhole tool stupendously increased during February 2011, in some instances increasing as high as 800,000 attacks per day. Besides, the kit was utilized for a major attack on the UK netizens.

According to the AVG report, majority of those identifications appear to have originated from an amalgamation of advertisement networks and adult websites, however most interestingly, they were attacking the UK more than anywhere else, as reported by V3 on April 21, 2011.

On the whole, AVG stated that Blackhole was responsible for 44% of the total malware detections identified during Q1-2011, as well as for over 86% of the attack toolkit uses.

Besides Blackhole, the report discusses about Facebook and how it is being exploited by the cybercriminals.

The report states that, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking websites today. Cyber criminals generally tend to target the most famous applications or services utilized by most of the netizens; in the case of Facebook it can penetrate a large group of people. Social networking websites have become a preferred destination for the bad guys of the web. The definite trust among people or friends on social networking websites makes it simpler for a cybercrooks to launch large scale attacks against innocent netizens, as reported by Tech Crunch on April 20, 2011.

According to the AVG data, nearly 42% of the identified malware on the social networking websites is associated with the Facebook applications.

According to the security firm, bit.ly is the URL shortening service, which is most generally used to circulate spam e-mail messages.

Further, as per the report, the United States is still leading the world in terms of spam circulation. The US is followed by the UK, with Brazil at the third rank. English remains the key language utilized in spam e-mail messages.

Related article: “Loopholes did not cause online banking thefts”: ICBC

» SPAMfighter News - 4/27/2011