The report indicates that online banking malware directly targeting victims’ finances has intensified globally in 2013, while prolific ransomware has increased and evolved throughout the year.
The same source points out that, online banking malware was detected in countries that had not been previously targeted, increasing not only in number, but spread across the globe.
Research unveils that Japan and the US have remained most affected by online banking malware throughout the year, with Brazil and Taiwan following. A spike in increased online banking activity in Brazil and Japan were cited as a possible explanation for the rise in malicious activity.
According to the report, there was a sizable increase in both volume and sophistication of mobile threats in 2013. As the most dominant operating system in the market, Android also holds the top spot for drawing the most malicious applications. Almost 1.4 million Android apps were found to be malicious by the end of 2013 – 1 million found in 2013 alone.
Furthermore, while 90% of malicious and high-risk apps were hosted on dodgy domains, about 27% of the total was also found on legitimate app stores.
The survey also shows that 2013 has registered an increase in phishing attacks specifically targeting Apple users as criminals recognise the potential revenue from its install base.
Through social networking and “personal cloud” accounts, personal privacy became a recurring issue. Aggressive phishing attacks riding on the release of popular products such as PS4 and Xbox One emerged to compromise personal information. High-profile incidents of infrastructure being targeted by cyber-attacks became a reality in South Korea, demonstrating how critical operations can be impacted on a broad scale.
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