Spike in Gaming/Banking Trojans Together With Spam During December 2008

Provider of UTM (Unified Threat Management) solutions, Fortinet, has issued its December 2008 Threatscape report that highlights a considerable jump in the activities of two online gaming and banking trojans and a double-digit rise in spam worldwide.

According to the company, there has been a steep rise in the activities of the W32/Zbot.GXN!tr.spy banking/keylogger Trojan that occupied the first position on Fortinet's list of top 100 malware. W32/Zbot.GXN!tr.spy continued its attack for four days (November 25-28, 2008), possibly to steal consumer credit card/banking information.

Another topper on the list was Spy/OnLineGames, the gaming Trojan. It moved up 75 positions to reach the 3rd place and continued the Internet gaming pattern that Fortinet's research team first detected in April 2008.

Further, after the McColo shutdown, it took nearly one month for spam-spewing botnets to recover and to show a steady rise, with almost 11% increase in December 2008, said the report. The botnets exploited the failing economy and holiday season to send spam. E-cards, notifications of a UPS package that failed to get delivered and home-loan modifications were the most common spam themes.

The report further said that malware operations shifted from scareware tricks to information transmission and keylogging in December 2008. Geographically, in terms of generating malware volume, United States overtook Asian nations to register growth rate of 42.72%, the highest for the country in several months. However, Asia is continued to be a highly attacked region with Japan accounting for 37.33% of malware, China -25.13%, Taiwan - 20.54% and India -19.08%.

Additionally, the percentage of web-traffic activity blocked continued to be steady since November 2008. Pornography accounted for the major share at 70%, while spyware, malware and phishing accounted for the rest 30% of the total traffic blocked. In the 30%, malware led others with nearly 20%.

However, with increasing number of exploitable applications, a large number of Internet revenue and avenues for stealing, and plenty of corporate networks as potential hacking targets, cyber criminals would have no dearth of samples to attack.

Hence, organizations need to keep their guard on and IT departments to remain expeditious and proactive in their protection.

Related article: Spike in Attacks Causes Early Release of Windows Patch

» SPAMfighter News - 23-01-2009

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