Attempts to infect computers increases
Over 327 million attempts were made to infect users’ computers in different countries around the world during the first three months of 2010, Kaspersky Lab reported. This is a 26.8% rise on their statistics from previous quarter.
Kaspersky stated that the development of cybercrime is being fuelled by the spread of the Internet itself combined with ineffective legislation and growing unemployment.
In the last quarter of 2009 Kaspersky found the top three targets of malicious attacks were China (31.07%), Russia (9.82%) and India (6.19%). While they found the top three targets unchanged in the first quarter of 2010, the number of attacks against Chinese users fell dramatically to 18.05%, whilst those against Russian users rose to 13.18%.
The two main channels by which these threats proliferate Kaspersky found to be malicious websites that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers, their plug-ins, and PDF viewers, as well as “drive-by downloads.”
Exploits of the former type increased by 21.3% with nearly half of them targeting vulnerabilities in Adobe programs, Kaspersky found. They went on to explain that this was due to Adobe’s prevalence and multi-platform capabilities.
At the end of the quarter Kaspersky found trojans accounted for 21.46% of all threats detected on user computers. Adware came second in terms of prevalence.
Kaspersky warns that fake antivirus programs continue to develop and have flooded the Internet over the past year. Creators of such malware use a variety of techniques in order to trick users, such as copying the interfaces of popular security solutions. They also noticed that fake antivirus programs offer “technical support” services with increasing frequency.
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