Australia Left Out in APT Assaults during 2013, Finds Security Company

FireEye the security firm, which lately published its '2013 Advanced Threat Report' discovered that perpetrators of sinister as well as personalized APTs (advanced persistent threats) overlooked Australia in the attacks carried out against nation states in 2013.

The firm examined approximately 39,504 distinct online attacks identified in 2013 and found that 4,192 of them had connection with APTs.

It was realized that APT operations were responsible for about 17,995 distinct contaminations, with the maximum malware families targeting Germany, USA and Canada. FireEye detected 159 unique malware groups having association with APT, a number of which got written with the Dark Comet, Poison Ivy, Gh0stRAT, LV and the like hacker tools that are freely available.

The company observed that hackers not only relied on toolkits, but they also concentrated a considerable effort for evading security systems and staying persistent.

Curiously, the nation-wide breakdown of advanced persistent threats operation indicated within the report mentioned Australia nowhere. This is greatly contrary to one just published research by Fortinet that indicated Australia as ranked No.2 among the ten most-attacked nations, with USA ahead of it while countries following it being UK, Israel, Japan, France, Puerto Rio, Turkey, Mexico and Kazakhstan.

Moreover, the report mentions the firm as unearthing early command-and-control servers inside 206 TLDs (top-level domains) of national stature situated within all countries worldwide.

Furthermore, FireEye's research paper discovered web-based assaults being 5 times more in number compared to e-mail-based assaults around the world, while the individual nation-wide rate showed web assaults 3 times more compared to electronic mail assaults.

Senior Worldwide Threat Analyst Dr. Kenneth Geers with FireEye stated that the cyber attacks' growing frequency demonstrated how greatly malicious software attracted people seeking to gain sinister purposes. Marketwatch.com published this during end-week of February 2014.

Dr. Geers further stated that currently everybody was witnessing a worldwide increase in malware, APTs, command-and-control systems along with freely available tools getting utilized for enabling the attack methods. Since threats were perpetrated on a global scale, cyber-defenders became constrained given that they obtained little evidence as to the origin from where the future assault could arrive, he concluded.

» SPAMfighter News - 3/18/2014