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Kaspersky Lab publishes annual threat evolution report for 2009 |
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Kaspersky Lab, which providers solutions for secure content management, has brought out its annual publication on the evolution of spam and malware threats. The main trend in 2009, it says, was the ever-greater sophistication of malware technologies, even as there were global epidemics and cyber-criminals proceeded to add to their repertoire of Internet scams while the number of new malicious programs started to level out.  In 2009, Kaspersky says, malicious programs became significantly more complex. For instance, malware families with rootkit functionality not only became much more widespread but also markedly more sophisticated, such as the threats Sinowal (the bootkit), TDSS and Clampi. The company said previous predictions by Kaspersky Lab experts about an impending increase in the number of epidemics proved to be correct, and a whole series of malicious programs achieved the status of a global epidemic. The biggest epidemic of the year, according to Kaspersky, was Kido (Conficker), which infected over 7 million computers globally, prompting the formation of an international group to combat such a widespread threat. The Conficker Working Group, a first of sorts, is a collaboration between antivirus companies, Internet service providers, independent research groups, educational institutions and regulatory bodies. Kaspersky said that over the last 3-4 years, China has emerged as the leading source of malware. In 2009, Kaspersky Lab detected 73,619,767 network attacks, of which 52.7% originated from Internet resources in China. China also remained the leader in terms of numbers of potential victims, but the number of attacks dropped by 7%. Other countries near the top of the table last year, such as Egypt, Turkey, and Vietnam, now seem to be of less interest to cyber criminals. According to Kaspersky, the number of attacks on users based in the US, Germany, Great Britain and Russia rose significantly. Fraud on the Internet is also becoming more and more varied, with common or garden phishing attacks now being joined by sites that offer access to a range of services in return for payment. Russia leads in this area, with Russian scammers having created a wide range of sites offering “services” such as “locate someone via GSM”, “read private messages on social networking sites”, “collect information”, etc. In 2009, rogue antivirus solutions were also increasingly used by scammers and cyber criminals, and rogue software today is not only spread using other malicious programs (e.g. Kido) but also by Internet advertisements. Operating systems for mobile phones and Mac OS X are attracting more and more attention from malware writers, says Kaspersky. In 2009, even Apple took notice of the threat by building an antivirus scanner of sorts into the new version of its OS. The year also saw the first malicious programs detected for iPhones (Ike worms), the first piece of spyware for Android and the first incidents of signed malicious programs for Symbian smartphones. The appearance of Backdoor.Win32.Skimer, the first malicious program targeting ATM machines, was a unique event in 2009. Once an ATM was infected using a special access card, criminals were able to perform a number of illegal actions, such as withdraw all the funds in the ATM, or acquire data from cards used in the ATM. Despite the effects of the crisis, spam in email traffic did not decline. The volume of unsolicited mail worldwide actually grew in 2009, albeit by only 3.1%, says Kaspersky. The average amount of spam in all email traffic in 2009 stood at 85.2%, with the US being the biggest source (16%), and Russia accounting for around 8.5% of the world’s spam. The main innovation in spam in 2009 was the use of YouTube for video spam. Another novelty was the use of mp3 attachments in emails. In terms of trends for the future, experts at Kaspersky Lab say they expect to see a gradual shift in the types of attacks on users: from attacks via websites and applications towards attacks originating from peer-to-peer file sharing networks. At the same time, malware is expected to become even more sophisticated. They also forecast a rough ride for the iPhone and devices running the Android OS, as the number of malicious programs targeting them grows. Meanwhile, the decline in gaming Trojans witnessed in 2009 is likely to be repeated for rogue antivirus programs in 2010. |
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