E-mails Delivering Malware Leaves Mark on September 2011 Threat Landscape, States Symantec

Symantec Corp. lately published its Symantec Intelligence Report for September 2011, according to which, there has been a massive increase in offensive e-mails delivering malware that marked the month's e-threat scenario. Also, the malware in the e-mails comprised general polymorphic malware at the rate of 72% and was first detected during July 2011 in that month's Symantec Intelligence Report. Further, when July ended, this rate stood at 23.7%, while during August 2011, it dropped a little to 18.5% prior to elevating to 72% during September 2011.

Remarking about the above statistics, Senior Intelligence Analyst Paul Wood at Symantec.cloud stated that the never-like-before escalated limit underscored the way online-crooks had increased their attacks against commercial enterprises during 2011, wholly taking advantage of the conventional security countermeasures that were now flawed. Marketwatch.com published this on September 27, 2011.

Additionally, the study as well shows that there has also been acceleration in the use of socially-engineered tactics for most of the above assaults, when cyber-criminals adopted various new methods like posing to represent in an electronic mail sent from an intelligent scanner/printer that a colleague supposedly forwarded from the same company.

But according to Wood, while an e-mail recipient's office printer transmitting him malicious software is probably unexpected, it's this very untrue feeling of security which's enough for the above kind of assault to succeed. Infosecurity-magazine.com published this on September 27, 2011.

Wood continues that hackers using JavaScript to cause infections have been identified too during September 2011. As per him, spammers find it beneficial to host plain web-pages obfuscated with JavaScript on non-chargeable support websites as that can extend those pages' lifetime prior to the website administrators' realization about their pages getting exploited for carrying out sinister operations.

Notably JavaScript, says Wood, is commonly utilized to divert visitors browsing a hijacked Internet site onto the spammers' own malicious web-pages. Whilst cyber-criminals have been frequently using a few of these tactics for distributing malware over a brief period, they're now being profusely utilized, he explains.

Besides, according to Symantec's most recent report, there was a 1% rise in Web-based malware attacks, whilst phishing e-mails fell 0.26% over 2010.

Related article: E-Crime Reporting Format To Be Launched in July

» SPAMfighter News - 10/6/2011