Symantec Reveals: Financial Malware Has Risen at a Massive Pace

SecurityWatch reported in the fourth week of December 2013 quoting the recently released whitepaper by security vendor Symantec stating that the industry of financial malware or Trojans has been steadily growing as money is moving to online banking applications.

Within the first 270 days or 9 months of this year (referring to 2013) infections by the most common financial Trojans rose by 337% which means almost half a million computers are infected every month are susceptible to fraud. Symantec analyzed eight configuration files of online banking Trojan to understand better which links are hit by Trojans and the tactics of criminals. The whitepaper reveals the extensive reach of Trojans; they can and will hit anything to achieve monetary proceeds from.

The whitepaper also found that most prevalent banking Trojans in 2013 were variants of Zeus, Zbot and Gameover that hijacked in excess of two million machines worldwide during first 3 quarters of 2013.

Other dangerous attackers include Cridex which compromised 125,000 computers and Shylock, SpyEye and Bebloh with each hijacking over 10,000 devices.

According to the study, Symantec discovered that most famous sufferer among the targeted financial institutions was a US financial institute which accounts for just about 72% of the Trojan assaults. In reality, half of the top-ten most targeted organizations were located in the US, three were from UK, one from Italy and one located in a trio of countries - Columbia, Spain and UK.

Symantec also noticed a surge in number of cyberattacks that hit the Bitcoin currency that has become popular among digerati and cybercriminals for its capability to permit anonymous transactions. It (Bitcoins) is generated by solving intricate calculations that need high amount of processing-time which is nicknamed as 'mining'.

Eweek.com published news on 26th December, 2013 quoting a report of Symantec as "we expect the attacker's interest in this digital currency will grow further."

Symantec concluded that upbeat measures should to be taken to guarantee that adequate security methods are in place and sturdy measures will discourage criminals from targeting these enterprises.

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