Web threats

In Q1 2018, we observed a significant increase in both the total number and duration of DDoS attacks against Q4 2017. The new Linux-based botnets Darkai (a Mirai clone) and AESDDoS are largely responsible for this hike.

Q4 2017 represented something of a lull: both the number and duration of DDoS attacks were down against the previous quarter. At the same time, the increase in the number of attacks on honeypot traps in the runup to holiday sales indicates that cybercriminals are keen to expand their botnets at the most opportune moment by pressuring owners of online resources and preventing them from making a profit.

In 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s web antivirus detected 15 714 700 unique malicious objects and 199 455 606 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components. Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 1 188 728 338 malicious attacks launched from online resources located in 206 countries all over the world.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 277,646,376 malicious attacks from online resources located in 185 countries all over the world.

In the third quarter of 2017, we registered a considerable increase in the number of both DDoS attacks and their targets. Traditionally, China is the country with the largest number of attack sources and targets. It was followed by the United States and South Korea. The popularity of Windows OS as a basis for creating a botnet has fallen noticeably, while the share of Linux-based botnets increased proportionally.

The Facebook malware that spread last week was dissected in a collaboration with Kaspersky Lab and Detectify. We were able to get help from the involved companies and cloud services to quickly shut down parts of the attack to mitigate it as fast as possible.

One good thing about having a lot of Facebook friends is that you simply act as a honey pot when your friends click on malicious things. A few days ago I got a message on Facebook from a person I very rarely speak to, and I knew that something fishy was going on.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 342, 566, 061 malicious attacks from online resources located in 191 countries all over the world.

The second quarter quite clearly showed that the DDoS-attack threat is perceived rather seriously. Some companies were prepared to pay cybercriminals literally after their first demand without waiting for the attack itself. This set off a whole new wave of fraud involving money extortion under threat of a DDoS attack, also known as “ransom DDoS”.

We recently reported about SambaCry, a new family of Linux Trojans exploiting a vulnerability in the Samba protocol. A week later, Kaspersky Lab analysts managed to detect a malicious program for Windows that was apparently created by the same group responsible for SambaCry.

According to Gartner, there are currently over 6 billion IoT devices on the planet. Such a huge number of potentially vulnerable gadgets could not possibly go unnoticed by cybercriminals. As of May 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s collections included several thousand different malware samples for IoT devices, about half of which were detected in 2017.

Not long ago, news appeared online of a younger sibling for the sensational vulnerability EternalBlue. The story was about a new vulnerability for *nix-based systems – EternalRed (aka SambaCry). On May 30th our honeypots captured the first attack to make use of this particular vulnerability, but the payload in this exploit had nothing in common with the Trojan-Crypt that was EternalBlue and WannaCry.

Friday May 12th marked the start of the dizzying madness that has been ‘WannaCry’, the largest ransomware infection in history. We figured it’s time to sit down and set the record straight on what we know, what we wish we knew, and what the near future might hold for us going forward.

Earlier today, our products detected and successfully blocked a large number of ransomware attacks around the world. In these attacks, data is encrypted with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filenames. Our analysis indicates the attack, dubbed “WannaCry”, is initiated through an SMBv2 remote code execution in Microsoft Windows.

Although the first quarter of 2017 was rather quiet compared to the previous reporting period, there were a few interesting developments. Despite the growing popularity of IoT botnets, Windows-based bots accounted for 59.81% of all attacks. Meanwhile, complex attacks that can only be repelled with sophisticated protection mechanisms are becoming more frequent.