Windows malware

A cross-platform win32-based Mirai spreader and botnet is in the wild and previously discussed publicly. However, there is much information confused together, as if an entirely new IoT bot is spreading to and from Windows devices. This is not the case. Instead, an accurate assessment is that a previously active Windows botnet is spreading a Mirai bot variant.

In other words, crypto ransomware is a fine tuned, user friendly and constantly developing ecosystem. In the last few years we, at Kaspersky Lab, have been monitoring the development of this ecosystem. This is what we’ve learned.

Last November we conducted a brief analysis of the threat landscape over the holiday period – from October to December in 2014 and 2015. And we made the following prognosis: the same holiday period in 2016 will see a spike in cyberattacks. Now that the holidays are over, it is time to find out how accurate that prediction was.

2016 was a tense and turbulent year in cyberspace – from the massive IoT botnets and ransomware to targeted cyberespionage attacks, financial theft, ‘hacktivism’ and more. Kaspersky Lab’s Review of the Year and Statistics provide a detailed review – you can read the Executive Summary here.

Between January and September 2016 ransomware attacks on business increased three-fold – to the equivalent of an attack every 40 seconds. With the ransomware-as-a-service economy booming, and the launch of the NoMoreRansom project, Kaspersky Lab has named ransomware its key topic for 2016.

The most popular mobile Trojan in the third quarter of 2016 was Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Svpeng.q. During the quarter, the number of users attacked by it grew almost eightfold.

Trojan-Ransom.AndroidOS.Fusob.h remained the most popular mobile Trojan-Ransomware in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 53% of users attacked by mobile ransomware.

While ransomware is a global threat, every now and then we see a variant that targets one specific region. Today we can add a new one to the list: Wildfire.

Brazil is the most infected country worldwide when it comes to banking Trojans, and the quality of the malware is evolving dramatically. Now Brazilian bad guys have made an important addition to their arsenal: the use of PowerShell.

Cybercrime in Brazil has changed drastically in the last few years, as it shifted from simple keyloggers to tailored remote administration tools that can run a complete attack by using the victim machine. As we know, they are in touch with cybercriminals from Eastern Europe, mainly Russians.

This is what we found in a new Brazilian Trojan in the wild: it tries to conceal the malicious files in a PNG image. And the attack starts with a simple phishing PDF.

Steam experiences steady growth in the number of active users registered on the platform. Security research has tragically ignored gaming malware in the mistaken assumption that nothing of any real value is traded there. This blind spot is being abused by cybercriminals to steal money and affect real damage.

We found a new wave of different campaigns spreading the initial “Banloader” components in Jar (Java archive). It’s able to run on Linux, OS X, Windows. It’s also able to run under certain circumstances even on mobile devices.

Recently we came across a new family of cross-platform backdoors for desktop environments. First we got the Linux variant, and with information extracted from its binary, we were able to find the variant for Windows desktops, too. Not only that, but the Windows version was additionally equipped with a valid code signing signature. Let´s have a look at both of them.

In 2015, virus writers demonstrated a particular interest in exploits for Adobe Flash Player. The proportion of relatively simple programs used in mass attacks was growing. Attackers have mastered non-Windows platforms – Android and Linux: almost all types of malicious programs are created and used for these platforms.