Cyber-attacks are becoming faster and more advanced, according to the Cyberoam Internet Threat Report for the third quarter of 2013.
The primary observation derived of these campaigns was that the time between the news event and the related malware attack has steadily decreased throughout the year. As for the trend on these realtime campaigns – they’ve got faster.
In March 2013, when the new Pope was elected, the first malware attacks began after 55 hours. In April 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing, it took 27 hours to see the first related attacks exploiting interest in the event. The new average time to exploit news events for malware distribution now averages to only 22 hours.
Few other examples of the real-time malware campaigns in Q3 include the news of royal baby Prince George, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and the Syria crisis. Examples such as the Syria-related campaign in September show that spammers are not waiting around – the attacks spring faster than the news of the event.
Dramatic rise in Phishing sites by almost 35% in Q3
Apart from the reducing time between news events and related attack, the average number of daily phishing sites was found increasing by nearly 35% in Q3. According to the Cyberoam Internet Threat Report for the third quarter of 2013, the PayPal phishing sites alone accounted for approximately 750 new phishing sites each day.
Repeating e-mail-malware campaigns
Yet another aspect worth noting found in the Cyberoam Internet Threat Report for the third quarter of 2013 is the detection of numerous repeating e-mail-malware campaigns in Q3.
As usual, the emails and notifications were sent in the name of big companies and brands, but included a malicious email attachment and in some cases, also a link to an infected website. The brands used in the attacks included Apple, Burger King, KFC, Walmart, UPS, DPD, MoneyGram and so on.
Other highlights from the October 2013 report included details about the categories of Web sites that were most likely to be compromised with malware. Travel Web sites topped this list of 10.
The report also talks about the Mobile malware and top 5 most commonly seen Android threats. In addition to these, details on Q3 trends related to E-mail Malware, Spam Trends, Spam Topics, Email Zombies and more, are also covered in the report.