Unearth Malware Attack Strategies by Cyber Crooks: Third Quarter e-Crime Report

According to the revelation of a recently released Third Quarter e-Crime Report by Internet Identity (IID), a technology and services provider facilitating organizations towards securing their existence in the Internet, there is a massive growth of malicious websites by 88% during the third quarter against Q2 2011.

The IID report figured the FDIC, U.S. Federal Reserve, IRS and National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) as the most impersonated organizations. The re-emergence of the Avalanche phishing squad, held in charge for two-thirds of all the phishing damage taking place in the second half of 2009, is held responsible for the large increase in malware sites.

Rod Rasmussen, IID President and CTO was not surprised much by the sudden reappearance of Avalanche as it is evident that this gang is now providing their enormous botnet as an infrastructure for hire, as reported in eweekeurope.co.uk on November 2, 2011.

In a statement by Rasmussen, online crooks are always upgrading themselves to the upcoming security techniques and threat responsiveness and as an industry it lies within the vicinity of the industry heads to sophisticate their technologies against all online threats.

However, the IID report also revealed that phishing volume decreased by 8% from the second quarter and by 11% from the third quarter of 2010. The reductions are attributed partly to Microsoft's latest botnet takedown infecting 41,000 systems in Kelihos botnet that restrained orders against Czech operators of the cz.cc second-level domain.

In July 2011, Google de-indexed the second-level domain co.cc in search results. On the whole, the co.cc top-level domain was accredited for 2% phishing in the third quarter of 2011 and second-level domain accounted for 43%. Since then, phishing traffic seems to have shifted to the cx.cc domain as reported by the report.

According to the report, in the phase after initializing a phishing crackdown and hosting locations while eliminating searching results, criminals basically get less opportunity for creating phishing, as reported in the website of gcn on November 2, 2011. Thus, it might be due to this fact that criminals seek to other means of defrauding and invigorating the internet with spam.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/9/2011