“Blackhole” toolkit dominates online malware attacks

According to a security report released by Sophos, “drive-by” attacks now account for more than half of all online malware attacks.

Of these attacks, a toolkit known as “Blackhole” is responsible for at least 31 percent of web attacks detected by Sophos in the second half of 2012.

Blackhole is an exploit kit used to inject malware onto PCs that visit an exploit site, or are redirected to such a site from another, compromised website. The kit’s developers continuously update Blackhole’s exploit capabilities, which centre on Java vulnerabilities.

Other interesting statistics in the Sophos report include:

• The US tops the world in sources of spam e-mails, accounting for 11.43 percent of 2011’s detected traffic. India was the closest runner-up, at 8 percent.
• The riskiest place to run a computer network in the world is Chile, measured by the percentage of computers experiencing a malware attack over a three month period, scoring a threat exposure rate (TER) of 61, nearly ten times the rate of attacks on systems in the US. China came in second with a TER of 45. The country with the safest network: Luxembourg.
• Conficker, the Windows worm also known as Downup and Kido, is still the most commonly detected malware in the world over three years after its first detection. The worm, which spreads over network connections, thumb drives, and other removable media, accounted for nearly 15 percent of all infection attempts caught by Sophos in the last six months.

Read the full story over at: Sophos.

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