Malicious Assaults Targeting Adobe Flash Increased during Q1-2015, Reports McAfee

McAfee Labs has said that malware-laden Adobe Flash assaults have been rising during January-March 2015 at the rate of 317%.

Apparently, attackers have been shifting focus towards un-patched Flash security flaws away from Microsoft Silverlight and Java.

Researchers, according to McAfee Labs Threat Report for May, attribute the rise to the technology's widespread acceptance, fresh techniques of exploitation, end-users not applying patches in time, problem in spotting certain attack codes, and availability of more mobile devices that adjust Adobe's Flash files.

According to Senior Vice-President Vincent Weafer at McAfee Labs, as software like Flash gain popularity, an immense amount of responsibility accompanies that of proactively detecting as also lessening security problems which likely threaten innumerable end-users. Pcmag.com reported this, June 9, 2015.

Moreover, it's evident from McAfee's new report that ransomware attacks increased at the rate of 165% during Q1-2015. Previously during 2014, these assaults showed a slight decline after Interpol executed one coordinated crackdown for busting one prominent ransomware network; however post that the attacks rebounded.

McAfee explains the rise as mainly because of the latest, difficult-for-identifying CTB-Locker family-of-ransomware, one fresh ransomware named Teslacrypt, as also fresh editions of BandarChor, TorrentLocker and CryptoWall emerging.

The success of CTB-Locker is because of the malware's clever tactics in escaping security software, spoofed e-mails having higher-quality phishing components along with one affiliate software through which accomplices get some portion of the ransoms paid provided they inundate the Internet with phishing e-mails carrying CTB-Locker.

McAfee identified a total of 700,000 strains of ransomware infecting PCs, networks and phones during Q1-2015.

And though Intel Security hasn't identified, a connection between the Equation Group and NSA's elite units has been done.

According to McAfee, it considers mixed software-hardware exploits and threats gravely at Intel. A minute monitoring was done of both in-the-wild malware instances and theoretical proofs-of-concept using BIOS manipulation and firmware, while the said Equation Group's firmware assaults are regarded to be highly advanced attacks of their sort. Historically the kind of malware got leveraged for assaults of the highly targeted kind, however, organizations require being prepared to have the apparently unavoidable, unique variants of such malware soon, McAfee adds.

» SPAMfighter News - 6/17/2015