Cyber Criminals Infected 1.2 Million Computers

A chain of 1.2 Million malware-infected computers, controlled by the cyber criminals, have been detected by the security experts at AVG.

The experts discovered that the cyber criminals were taking the help of a toolkit named "Electronic toolkit", which targets websites containing malware to steal data, like credit card information, emails and national insurance statistics.

The report reveals that more and more cyber criminals are concentrating on money and advanced business, which means that the "toolkit" is specially created to affect computers, so that the stolen data could be bought and sold.

AVG has done a two-month-long research in which they have found that the cyber criminals used 165 Eleonore toolkits, enjoying the success rate of 10% in affecting around 12 Million users who visited their fake websites.

Each of the 165 domain operated by the cyber criminals received high traffic volumes.

Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Senior Vice President, AVG Technologies, revealed that the easy availability and high sophistication of this usable 'cyber criminal toolkits' certified the advancement of cyber gangs in their criminal operations, as per the report published by BUSINESS WIRE on 22nd July, 2010.

The Eleonore toolkits software attacks the known vulnerabilities mainly in the older versions of Microsoft's web browser. It should be noted that Internet Explorer 6 represented one-third of attacks. Adobe Acrobat and Sun Javascript have also represented an alarming amount of attacks.

Apparently, Apple Browser Safari is the most protected browser as it accounted only a meager 2.78% of attacks.

The main servers via the cyber gangs conducted the attacks were mainly located in the countries like Ukraine, Russia Federation and Kazakhstan.

The Russian Federation is also being targeted by the hackers, with a record of 8,9906,025 attacks. Out of these attacks, 916,430 (10.3%) were successful. Both the United States and Britain encountered around half a million infections, with a similar success level.

Hence, the AVG security experts advise the users to use a suitable security software in order to protect their systems from getting infected by such progressively famous cyber threats.

Related article: Cyber Child abuser Sentenced To Imprisonment

» SPAMfighter News - 8/3/2010