Windows malware

During the year, Kaspersky Lab solutions repelled 1 876 998 691 attacks launched from online resources located all over the world, 554 159 621 unique malicious objects were detected and 21 643 946 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components.

These statistics are based on detection verdicts of Kaspersky Lab products received from users who consented to provide statistical data. Q3 figures According to Kaspersky Security Network: Kaspersky Lab solutions blocked 947,027,517 attacks launched from online resources located in 203 countries. 246,695,333 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by Web Anti-Virus components. Attempted infections by

LuckyMouse, mobile Trojan Asacub, BusyGasper, KeyPass ransomware and other notable targeted attacks and malware stories of Q3 2018.

In 2016, researchers from the University of Illinois left 297 unlabelled USB flash drives around the university campus to see what would happen. 98% of the dropped drives were picked up by staff and students, and at least half were plugged into a computer in order to view the content. For a hacker trying to infect a computer network, those are pretty irresistible odds.

In the last few days, our anti-ransomware module has been detecting a new variant of malware – KeyPass ransomware. According to our information, the malware is propagated by means of fake installers that download the ransomware module.

Olympic Destroyer worm, Roaming Mantis mobile banker, Operation Parliament cyber-espionage campaign, SynAck ransomware and other notable targeted attacks and malware campaigns of Q2 2018.

In Q2 2018, attempted infections by malware designed to steal money via online access to bank accounts were logged on the computers of 215,762 users, ransomware attacks were registered on the computers of 158,921 unique users.

Recently, an interesting miner implementation appeared on Kaspersky Lab’s radar. The malware, which we dubbed PowerGhost, is capable of stealthily establishing itself in a system and spreading across large corporate networks infecting both workstations and servers.

This spring marked the fourth anniversary of the malware’s first attacks. Against the backdrop of a general decline in ransomware activity (see our report), we decided to return to the topic of Cryakl and tell in detail about how one of the most eye-catching members of this endangered species evolved.

In April 2018, we spotted the first ransomware employing the Process Doppelgänging technique – SynAck ransomware. It should be noted that SynAck is not new, but a recently discovered sample caught our attention after it was found to be using Process Doppelgänging. Here we present the results of our investigation of this new SynAck variant.

Last year we published a story revealing the rise of miners across the globe. At the time we had discovered botnets earning millions of USD. We knew this was just the beginning of the story, which turned out to develop rapidly.

In 2017, the main global threat to users was ransomware: and in order to recover files and data encrypted by attackers, victims were required to pay a ransom in cryptocurrency. In the first eight months of 2017, Kaspersky Lab products protected 1.65 million users from malicious cryptocurrency miners, and by the end of the year we expect this number to exceed two million.

The authors of malware use various techniques to circumvent defensive mechanisms and conceal harmful activity. One of them is the practice of hiding malicious code in the context of a trusted process. Typically, malware that uses concealment techniques injects its code into a system process, e.g. explorer.exe. But some samples employ other interesting methods. We’re going to discuss one such type of malware.

Over the last month alone, we have detected several large botnets designed to profit from concealed crypto mining. We have also observed growing numbers of attempts to install miners on servers owned by organizations. When these attempts are successful, the companies’ business processes suffer because data processing speeds fall substantially.

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.