PayPal, eBay, HSBC Top-Phished Institutions; China and Russia Hosting Majority of Malware – Predictions for Malware Activity Over The Second Half of the Year

Today BitDefender, released a report that found the first half of 2010 saw a rise of worms exploiting various Web 2.0 platforms. The report examined data from January through June 2010 and found social networks and Web 2.0 services have become one of the most valuable channels of malware dissemination during the last six months, while phishers focused on impersonating PayPal and eBay, and pharmacy spam volume now makes up two-thirds of all spam.

Spam and Phishing Trends in First Half of 2010

Financial institutions were cyber-criminals’ preferred targets, constituting more than 70 percent of global phishing messages. Social networks also came under heavy fire, as user profiles are a rich source of personal information and compromised accounts may be effectively used in spear phishing attacks. For the first half of 2010, phishers focused on impersonating PayPal and eBay. The HSBC Bank ranks third, while Poste Italiene and EGG conclude the list of the most abused online identities.

World’s Top 10 Phishing Targets January – June 2010

The FIFA World Cup and the massive floods in Guatemala were two of the many events used for Black-Hat SEO optimization to improve the ranking of various malware-serving websites in the first half of 2010. The period also saw spam messages grow to 86 percent of the total email, driven by pharmacy spam, which reached new heights – jumping from 51 to 66 percent of all spam.

The spam breakdown by type for the first half of 2010 is:

• Medicine Spam – 66%
• Replica products – 7%
• Loans and insurance – 5%
• Bundled malware – 3.5%
• Casino and gambling – 3.5%

Malware Threats in Review

Exploiting Windows’ Autorun feature – Trojan.AutorunINF.Gen ranked first in the study, with more than 11 percent of the total number of infections, while MBR worms have made a comeback with upgraded viral mechanisms. Late January saw the emergence of Win32.Worm.Zimuse.A, a deadly combination of virus, rootkit and worm. Upon infection, the worm would start counting down the days. 40 days from the infection, it would overwrite the hard disk drive’s Master Boot Record, thus rendering the OS unable to boot. China and the Russian Federation led the world in malware hosting, with 31 and 22 percent respectively.

World’s Top 10 Malware January – June 2010

Vulnerabilities, Exploits and Breeches

Critical zero-day exploits on popular software such as the Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft or Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash Player and even Adobe Photoshop CS 4 have also played a key role in the malware landscape for the first half of 2010. Some of the Internet Explorer exploits have even been used to attack major companies such as Google, Adobe and Rackspace.

E-Threat Predictions

“With Facebook surpassing 400 million users, most of the malware authors will focus on the social networking platform to deliver their newest payloads. Some of these attacks will focus on social engineering tricks (such as launching various malware offensives from compromised computers), while others will try to exploit different vulnerabilities or features already implemented across the platform,” said Catalin Cosoi, Head of the BitDefender Online Threats Lab.

For more information and to see the full report, please click here.

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