Internet Crooks Have New Economic Method For Their Malware Activity

According to MessageLabs of security company Symantec, cyber-criminals are now employing a more economic method to reap even more monetary gains while distributing malware.

In its August report, MessageLabs states that cyber-criminals are no longer generating as much fresh malicious programs for the continuation of their criminal operations, rather they are going for an inexpensive approach. Accordingly, they find adopting fresh domains as more economical, and by distributing their malicious programs across the maximum possible domains and websites, they are increasing each malware's span of existence.

Further according to MessageLabs, of the total 3,510 malevolent websites that were stopped every day during August 2009, 36.1% were blocked as never before. However, most of the first-time blocked new websites are already registered lawful domains, which have been hijacked, while 16% represent just registered domains.

States intelligence senior analyst Paul Wood at MessageLabs, during January-June 2009, over 33% of websites thwarted daily were fresh sites that hadn't been utilized earlier for hosting malware. Security management reported this on August 26, 2009.

Wood further says that with malware too, during the said months, about 12% of the malicious programs intercepted daily were fresh malware that hadn't appeared previously.

In addition, MessageLabs said that the country supporting new malevolent Internet sites were now expected to be different from what was being indicated via the registered country-code or top-level domains. For instance, 46% of websites with .cn domain that were thwarted were actually based in China, however, the country supported 33.3% of thwarted websites with .in domains as well along with 18.2% of malicious sites with .ru domain. In Ukraine, there were 23% of websites with .cn that received hosting facility.

Said the researchers from MessageLabs, for the con artists, creating new malware for maintenance of criminal activity could be an expensive affair.

Meanwhile, a study by IBM X-Force reveals that the total number of fresh web-links of malicious nature has increased 508% during January-June 2009. Moreover, search engines, mainstream bogs and news websites that are regarded as most reliable are risked with malicious-link hosting that could endanger the security of people's PCs, the study states.

Related article: Internet Threat Volumes Overwhelm Security Companies

» SPAMfighter News - 9/12/2009