Malware Exploit Threats Reach at New Height

Cybersecurity experts of NSA have allegedly developed huge online dump of exploits, due to which malware attacks have reached new high. What happened when the security exploits as well as the malware that was developed by industry best gets leaked into wild or got sold to the criminals? We will see a massive rise in number of attacks. Although most of security industry normally put blame on victim, by saying that someone must has done some stupid thing, it is now becoming even more difficult also for most cautious users to remain safe from continuous growing malware attacks.

The landscape was noticeably gets shifted in last few months, as many high profile malware and ransomware campaigns have used exploits that was dumped by the Shadow Brokers. The attacks such as Petya, WannaCry, ExPetr, and NotPetya used EternalBlue exploit that was developed by NSA (National Security Agency) and got leaked by the Shadow Brokers.

Wccftech.com posted on August 15th, 2017, stating that Microsoft had fixed this vulnerability in April but the number of attacks on users of Microsoft Office increased "almost threefold to 1.5 million" just because users do not update their products and devices on time.

Exploit kits worry any malware which seems to take advantage of bugs in software to infect devices and can include ransomware, spyware or banking Trojans. Further, the security lab says that use of "in-the-wild vulnerabilities" has been more popular during Q2 2017. The security experts wrote: "the appearance of many 0-day vulnerabilities for Microsoft Office resulted in a significant change in the shape of used exploits."

The threat landscape of Q2 delivers yet another reminder that the dearth of alertness is one of the most significant cyber dangers. While vendors cover vulnerabilities regularly, several users do not pay attention on this, resulting in attacks of massive scale when the vulnerabilities were exposed to broad cybercriminal community.

Security experts continuously advise the consumers to have their software updated for avoiding falling for the vulnerabilities, which were already been patched. Now, the company is advising the users to have their PCs up to date, and also perform regular checks of security in trying to make sure that they do not get victimized by any attacks in future.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/21/2017