Kaspersky Lab Security Bulletin for 2015 shows mobile banking threats among the leading malicious financial programs for the first time

Woburn, MA – December 15, 2015 - The Kaspersky Lab Security Bulletin Overall Statistics Report for 2015 highlights a new trend: for the first time ever, mobile financial threats rank among the top ten malicious programs designed to steal money. Another alarming trend is the rapid spread of ransomware, which was detected by Kaspersky Lab in 200 countries and territories in this year alone.

Mobile financial threats mature

In 2015, traditional financial cybercrime hasn't declined, however, in total, Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked almost two million (1,966,324) attempts to launch malware capable of stealing money via online banking on computers, an increase of 2.8 percent from 2014 (1,910,520).

During the year, two families of mobile banking Trojans (Faketoken and Marcher) appeared in the Kaspersky Lab list of top 10 financial malware families.

The Faketoken family works in partnership with computer Trojans. A user is manipulated to install an application on their smartphone, which is actually a Trojan that intercepts the one-time confirmation code (mTAN). The malicious programs belonging to the Marcher family steal payment details from Android devices. It tracks the launch of just two apps after infecting a device – the mobile banking app of a European bank and Google Play. If the user starts either of these apps, Marcher displays a false window requesting credit card details which then are sent to the cybercriminals.

“This year cybercriminals focused time and resources in developing malicious financial programs for mobile devices. This is not surprising as millions of people worldwide now use their smartphone to pay for services and goods. Based on current trends, we can assume that next year, mobile banking malware will account for an even greater share,” says Yury Namestnikov, senior security researcher at Global Research and Analysis Team, Kaspersky Lab.

The global nightmare that is ransomware

In 2015, ransomware rapidly expanded its presence on new platforms. One in six (17%) ransomware attacks now involves an Android device, barely a year after the platform was first targeted.

Kaspersky Lab experts identified two big ransomware trends during the year. The first is that the total number of users attacked by encryption ransomware was almost 180,000 an increase 48.3 percent compared to 2014. Secondly, in many cases the encryptors are becoming multi-module and include functionality designed to steal data from victim computers.

Other main trends in cybercriminal activity:

• Cybercriminals looking to minimize the risk of criminal prosecution switched from malware attacks to the aggressive distribution of adware. In 2015, adware accounted for 12 of the top 20 web-based threats. Advertising programs were registered on 26.1 percent of user computers.
• Kaspersky Lab also observed new techniques for masking exploits, shellcodes and payloads to make the detection of infections and analysis of malicious code more difficult. Specifically, cybercriminals used the Diffie-Hellman encryption protocol and concealed exploit packs in Flash objects.
• Cybercriminals made active use of Tor anonymization technology to hide command servers, and used Bitcoins for making transactions.

In 2015, Kaspersky Lab products:

• Blocked attempts to launch malware capable of stealing money via online banking on almost two million computers worldwide, up 2.8 percent from 2014.
• Revealed that two thirds (67.7%) of computers, hard drives or removable media belonging to KSN users in the top 20 countries carried at least one malicious object, up from  58.7 percent in 2014.
• Detected four million unique malicious and potentially unwanted objects (local threats), up from 1.84 million in 2014.
• Detected 1.2 billion unique malicious objects: scripts, exploits, executable files, etc. a fall of 1.4 percent compared to 2014.

The geography of online attacks

80 percent of attack notifications blocked by antivirus components were received from online resources located in 10 countries. The top three countries where online resources were seeded with malware remained unchanged from the previous year: the United States (24.2%), Germany (13%), and the Netherlands (10.7%). This rating demonstrates that cybercriminals prefer to operate and use hosting services in different countries where the hosting market is well-developed.

Read the full report on Securelist.com

Overall statistics for 2014 are available here

About Kaspersky Lab

Kaspersky Lab is one of the world’s fastest-growing cybersecurity companies and the largest that is privately-owned. The company is ranked among the world’s top four vendors of security solutions for endpoint users (IDC, 2014). Since 1997 Kaspersky Lab has been an innovator in cybersecurity and provides effective digital security solutions and threat intelligence for large enterprises, SMBs and consumers. Kaspersky Lab is an international company, operating in almost 200 countries and territories across the globe, providing protection for over 400 million users worldwide.

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