Crimeware Evolution Grew Globally during H2-2010

APWG recently published its H2-2010 phishing Activity Trends Report, according to which, crimeware evolution profusely grew during July-December 2010, with a certain provider of data encountering over 10m fresh malicious programs during the six months, whilst other analysts enunciate crucial changes in cyber-crime groups' strategies towards crimeware deployment.

Essentially, as per the report, the country most infected with malware during H2-2010 was Thailand, accounting for 66.97% of all infections followed with China on No.2 at 62.82%. Other countries such as Taiwan, Latvia, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, Israel and Turkey too had high rates of malware infections as they accounted for 59.90%, 55.75%, 55.42%, 54.32%, 53.30% and 51.55% of all contaminations respectively.

Moreover, the industry most hit with malicious software was again the Financial Services sector during Q3-Q4-2010 following the Payment Services sector which eclipsed it during Q2-2010. Classifieds, which was largely hit with malware during Q2-2010, continued the trend and accounted for over 12% of all assaults during Q3-2010, prior to experiencing a decline in the attacks during Q4-2010 at below 2%.

Further discoveries in the report reveal that there was a constant decline in the total distinctive phishing e-mails that APWG became aware of during H2-2010 following an earlier high of 33,617 during June 2010. The July 2010 peak of 26,353 had dropped 35% from the 40,621 peak during August 2009. Conversely, the lowest metric in phishing e-mails during H2-2010 was in December when there was a 48% fall from the earlier highest volume.

Chairman of APWG Dave Jevans who's also contributing analyst of the latest report stated that during July-December 2010, a rise in spear-phishing was observed, in which cyber-criminals targeted specific persons within government agencies and business organizations with personalized bogus e-mails that usually carried crimeware payloads. Normally such e-mails eluded anti-virus and anti-spam filters as well as were extremely capable of contaminating the e-mail recipients' PCs, he added. Benzinga reported this on August 1, 2011.

Furthermore as per APWG, the SpyEye and ZeuS banker Trojans infected a remarkable 25% of PCs, compromising Internet bank accounts as well as stealing enormous funds out of municipalities' and businesses' financial accounts.

Related article: Crimeware Server Containing Stolen Data found in Argentina

» SPAMfighter News - 8/13/2011